Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations 9781107180949, 1107180945

Citation preview

Language and Materiality

Language and Materiality integrates linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship on a range of topics: semiotic approaches to language, language commodification, sound, embodiment, mediatization, and aesthetics. Empirically rigorous, the volume engages scholars and students interested in language, its use, and meanings. It has three parts “Texts, Objects, Mediality”; “Transformation, Aesthetics, Embodiment”; and “Time, Place, Circulation” framed by a curated conversation about semiotics and materiality in anthropology, a series of shorter topic-driven commentaries, and an afterword. Each section theorizes intersections, connections, and relationships between language and materiality across diverse topics and ethnographic contexts. The volume shows that materiality may be approached as a feature of political economy, sensual experience, aesthetics, and affective relationships in its relation to language as talk, register, genre, ideology, and acoustic object. It presents new perspectives on materiality as a vital dimension of social life and signification in global capitalism, connecting inquiries on subjects as diverse as food, media, fonts, and music. jillian r. cavanaugh is the Leonard and Claire Tow Research Professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, at the City University of New York. shalini shankar is Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.

Language and Materiality Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations Edited by

Jillian R. Cavanaugh The City University of New York

Shalini Shankar Northwestern University

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi - 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107180949 DOI: 10.1017/9781316848418  C Cambridge University Press 2017

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, Ltd. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-107-18094-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Language and Materiality

Language and Materiality integrates linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship on a range of topics: semiotic approaches to language, language commodification, sound, embodiment, mediatization, and aesthetics. Empirically rigorous, the volume engages scholars and students interested in language, its use, and meanings. It has three parts “Texts, Objects, Mediality”; “Transformation, Aesthetics, Embodiment”; and “Time, Place, Circulation” framed by a curated conversation about semiotics and materiality in anthropology, a series of shorter topic-driven commentaries, and an afterword. Each section theorizes intersections, connections, and relationships between language and materiality across diverse topics and ethnographic contexts. The volume shows that materiality may be approached as a feature of political economy, sensual experience, aesthetics, and affective relationships in its relation to language as talk, register, genre, ideology, and acoustic object. It presents new perspectives on materiality as a vital dimension of social life and signification in global capitalism, connecting inquiries on subjects as diverse as food, media, fonts, and music. jillian r. cavanaugh is the Leonard and Claire Tow Research Professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, at the City University of New York. shalini shankar is Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.

Language and Materiality Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations Edited by

Jillian R. Cavanaugh The City University of New York

Shalini Shankar Northwestern University

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi - 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107180949 DOI: 10.1017/9781316848418  C Cambridge University Press 2017

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, Ltd. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-107-18094-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Language and Materiality

Language and Materiality integrates linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship on a range of topics: semiotic approaches to language, language commodification, sound, embodiment, mediatization, and aesthetics. Empirically rigorous, the volume engages scholars and students interested in language, its use, and meanings. It has three parts “Texts, Objects, Mediality”; “Transformation, Aesthetics, Embodiment”; and “Time, Place, Circulation” framed by a curated conversation about semiotics and materiality in anthropology, a series of shorter topic-driven commentaries, and an afterword. Each section theorizes intersections, connections, and relationships between language and materiality across diverse topics and ethnographic contexts. The volume shows that materiality may be approached as a feature of political economy, sensual experience, aesthetics, and affective relationships in its relation to language as talk, register, genre, ideology, and acoustic object. It presents new perspectives on materiality as a vital dimension of social life and signification in global capitalism, connecting inquiries on subjects as diverse as food, media, fonts, and music. jillian r. cavanaugh is the Leonard and Claire Tow Research Professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, at the City University of New York. shalini shankar is Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.

Language and Materiality Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations Edited by

Jillian R. Cavanaugh The City University of New York

Shalini Shankar Northwestern University

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi - 110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107180949 DOI: 10.1017/9781316848418  C Cambridge University Press 2017

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, Ltd. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-107-18094-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Images List of Tables List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1 Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction shalini shankar and jillian r. cavanaugh 2 Curated Conversation: “Materiality: It’s the Stuff!” webb keane and michael silverstein

page vii ix xi xv 1 29

Part I Texts, Objects, Mediality 3 Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year: Commodified Language Forms in Multiple Contexts laura miller 4 Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language keith m. murphy 5 Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling shalini shankar

43 63

87

Part II Transformation, Aesthetics, Embodiment 6 How the Sausage Gets Made: Food Safety and the Mediality of Talk, Documents, and Food Practices jillian r. cavanaugh

105

7 “Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!”: How Honk Horns Voice the Acoustic Materiality of Reputation in Accra steven feld

125

v

vi

Contents

8 Transduction in Religious Discourse: Vocalization and Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices patrick eisenlohr

144

Part III Time, Place, Circulation 9 Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery: Materialization as Metacultural Transformation nikolas coupland and helen kelly-holmes 10

11

12

165

Word-things and Thing-words: The Transmodal Production of Privilege and Status crispin thurlow and adam jaworski

185

Language and Materiality in the Renaming of Indigenous North American Languages and Peoples robert moore

204

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia paul manning

226

Part IV More Stuff: Short Topical Commentaries on Language and Materiality and Afterword Can Language Be a Commodity? monica heller Language, Music, Materiality (and Immateriality): Entanglements beyond the “Symbolic” paja faudree

251

255

Why Bodies Matter mary bucholtz

260

Physicality and Texts: Rematerializing the Transparent jennifer dickinson

265

History, Artifacts, and the Language of Culture Change in Archaeology mark w. hauser

270

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language? Dualisms and Embodiments judith t. irvine

277

Index

295

Images

3.1 4.1 5.1 5.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 9.1 10.1 10.2a–d 10.3a–c 11.1 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4

Governor Inose and fifty million yen page 54 Four fonts 65 Objectifying words for ESPN speller profile segments 96 National Spelling Bee logo and honeycomb stage design 99 “Fear not” 131 “May be” 132 “Sea Never Dry” 133 “In God We Trust” 138 Melin Tregwynt’s weaving loom shed 176 Korean Air check-in counter at the Seattle-Tacoma airport 191 Crispin’s Bronze membership letter from British Airways 194 Adam’s Senator birthday card from Lufthansa 196 Old seal of Santo Domingo Pueblo and new seal of Kewa Pueblo 214 “Friends, with these different drinking vessels . . . ” 232 “Logic” 235 Mafia grave table 238 Stalin-era supra 242

vii

Tables

11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5

Nativization Suppletion (Northwest Coast) Suppletion (Southwest) Patterns in the Usage of Miami vs. Myaamia Selected Tribal Casino Names in Arizona and New Mexico

page 209 211 212 215 218

ix

Contributors

mary bucholtz is Professor in the University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Linguistics; her research focuses primarily on how social identities and cultural practices are brought into being through linguistic interaction, especially in relation to race, gender, and youth identities. She is the author of multiple articles and the book, White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity (2011; Cambridge University Press), as well as the editor of various collections, including Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self (1995, with Kira Hall). jillian r. cavanaugh is Associate Professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research has considered language shift and social transformation, language ideologies, language and materiality, language and gender, as well as the value of heritage food. Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Ethnos, among other journals, and her book, Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town, was published in 2009. Her current research is with food producers in northern Italy. nikolas coupland is Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University and Honorary Professor at Copenhagen University. With Allan Bell, he was the cofounding editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, and with Adam Jaworski he co-edits the book series, Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. He edited the recently published volume, Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates (2016; Cambridge University Press). jennifer dickinson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Vermont. She is a linguistic and economic anthropologist specializing in Eastern Europe. She has written numerous articles and, with Oksana Malanchuk, is the co-editor of a special issue of the journal Nationalities titled “Identity Formation and Social Problems in Estonia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan” (2005).

xi

xii

Contributors

patrick eisenlohr is Professor of Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen where he holds the chair of Society and Culture in Modern India. He obtained a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2001 and previously held positions at Utrecht University, Washington University in St. Louis, and New York University. He is the author of Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius (2006) and has conducted research on transnational Hindu and Muslim networks in Mauritius and India; the relationships between religion, language, and media; the links between media practices and citizenship, as well as language and diaspora. paja faudree is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brown University, where she is also a Faculty Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. In addition to publishing numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico (2013), which won the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology’s book prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She holds a PhD in linguistic anthropology and an MFA in literary arts, and is a published poet and playwright. steven feld is a musician, filmmaker, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. His books include Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kalului Expression, and Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana; his CDs include “Voices of the Rainforest” and “Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana; and his DVDs include The Story of Por Por and A Por Por Funeral for Ashirifie. mark w. hauser is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. A historical archaeologist, he specializes in materiality, slavery, and inequality. These key themes intersect in the seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries Atlantic and Indian Oceans and form a foundation for his research on the African diaspora and colonial contexts. He is author of An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Local Economies in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and has co-edited several volumes, including Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica and Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean. monica heller is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is a past president of the American Anthropological Association and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. Her most recent book, co-authored with Lindsay A. Bell, Michelle Daveluy, Mireille McLaughlin, and Hubert Noël, is Sustaining the Nation: The Making and Moving of Language and Nation (2015).

Contributors

xiii

helen kelly-holmes is Professor of Applied Languages at the University of Limerick and also Adjunct Professor of Discourse Studies at the University of Jyväskylä. She is co-editor with Ofelia García of Language Policy, and together with Sue Wright, she co-edits Palgrave’s Language and Globalization series. Recent publications include Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances 2016; Cambridge University Press, with Sari Pietikäinen, Nikolas Coupland, and Alexandra Jaffe and Language and the Media, a four-volume edited work for the Routledge Critical Concepts in Linguistics series. judith t. irvine is the Edward Sapir Collegiate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include language ideology, language and political economy, performance, colonial and historical linguistics, social organization, and Africa. adam jaworski is Professor of Language and Communication at the School of English, University of Hong Kong. His research interests include language and globalization, display of languages in space, media discourse, nonverbal communication, and text-based art. webb keane is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. The author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (2016), Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (2007), and Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (1997) and the co-editor of Handbook of Material Culture (2006), he has also published numerous articles on language, semiotics, religion, value, exchange, and social theory. paul manning is Professor of Anthropology at Trent University. He has done historical and ethnographic research on Wales and Georgia and, along with numerous articles, has published three recent books dealing in whole or in part with Georgia: Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgian Imaginaries, Semiotics of Drink and Drinking, and Love Stories: Language, Private Love, and Public Romance in Georgia. laura miller is the Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. She has written multiple articles and book chapters on Japanese culture and language, including topics such as English loanwords in Japanese, the wizard boom, girls’ slang, and print club photos. She is the author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics

xiv

Contributors

(2006) and the co-editor of various collections, including Manners and Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan (2011, with Jan Bardsley) and Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan (2013, with Alisa Freedman and Christine R. Yano). robert moore is Senior Lecturer in Educational Linguistics at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. His ethnographic work has focused on language shift in North American Native communities and on the politics of language in Ireland. Other work has contributed to discussions in a number of fields, including narrative discourse and ethnopoetics, language policy in contemporary Europe, and the semiotics of brands and branding. keith m. murphy is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. His research is primarily focused on design, material culture, and social interaction. He is the author of Swedish Design: An Ethnography (2015) and co-editor of Toward an Anthropology of the Will (2010). shalini shankar is Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Her research areas include race, ethnicity, language, semiotics, advertising, media, and consumption. She is the author of Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers (2015), Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley (2008), and numerous articles. Her forthcoming book is titled Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal about Generation Z’s New Path to Success (2018). michael silverstein is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Psychology and is on the Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He studies language structure and its functional contextualization, language history and prehistory, the anthropology of language use, sociolinguistics, semiotics, language and cognition (and their development), and the history of linguistic and ethnographic studies, about which he has written extensively. He is the author of multiple articles and chapters across a range of publications, including Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency (2013, with Michael Lempert). crispin thurlow is Professor of Language and Communication in the Department of English at the University of Bern, Switzerland. More information about his work can be found at www.crispinthurlow.net.

Acknowledgements

There are many people to thank for their help and participation in materializing this book. Foremost, we thank the contributors for their rich, provocative contributions. It was an honor to have assembled such a cast of players. Thank you for your commitment to and belief in this project. This volume originated in an American Anthropological Association double panel that we co-organized for the 2003 meetings in Chicago; it was titled “The Materiality of Language and the Language of Materiality.” From these initial interests we developed two other panels – one in 2008 titled “Toward A New Semiotic Anthropology: Social Theories of Meaning, Movement, and Subject Formation” and a third in 2012 titled “Language Commodification and Circulation in Global Capitalism.” Many of the participants in these panels have remained guiding interlocutors in the years since, whereas others have joined this conversation through other paths. We are grateful to those who engaged with us in ways that influenced and shaped this book, including Don Brenneis, Debbie Cameron, Alexandre Duchêne, Jessica Greenberg, Doug Holmes, Miyako Inoue, Marco Jaquemet, Bonnie McElhinney, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Fred Myers, and Bambi Schieffelin. Also informing our formulation of language materiality are two articles we coauthored, one for the Annual Review of Anthropology in 2012 and another for American Anthropologist in 2014. We are grateful to editors Donald Brenneis and Michael Chibnik, respectively, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments on each article. It has been a pleasure to work with Cambridge University Press on this volume. We are grateful to our editor Andrew Winnard for his ongoing interest in and helpful feedback about the volume and to others at the press who moved the volume through development and production. We are very thankful to Jennifer Porter-Lupu and Michael Mena for their proofreading assistance. Shalini Shankar wishes to thank Northwestern University, her husband Kurt, and children Roshan and Anisha. She also thanks Jillian, with whom it was a pleasure to work even through the least pleasurable aspects of assembling this volume. Thank you for your abiding friendship and collaboration. xv

xvi

Acknowledgements

Jillian Cavanaugh is grateful to Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY and to her family, Scott and Rawlins. She thanks Shalini, who has been her most generous and enjoyable interlocutor throughout this and other projects. It would not have been possible without you, and certainly a lot less fun.

1

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction Shalini Shankar and Jillian R. Cavanaugh

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.” (Marx and Engels, “Thesis on Feuerbach,” from The German Ideology)

What is “the language of real life”? Reading this quote through Raymond Williams’s (1977: 38) suggestion that language is “a distinctive material process,” we see the language of everyday life as material practice: embedded within structures of history and power, including class relations and markets, but also having physical presence. The language of everyday life is what people do with and through language as they work and play, making meaning and creating value in the process. In this volume, we seek to draw out the importance of considering these practices to be “distinctive material processes.” Putting language and materiality together at the center of analysis in this way can illuminate both how a linguistic approach to materiality can shed light on processes of meaning-making and value production and how incorporating materiality into linguistic analysis can ground such processes within social, cultural, political, and economic structures of power (Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014; Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). To theorize language materially is an ontological move – to view it as a material presence with physical and metaphysical properties and as embedded within political economic structures. Rather than view language and materiality in tandem by conceptualizing materiality alongside but distinct from language, we focus instead on the materiality of language, or what we call language materiality. In developing this concept, we have interrogated definitions and uses of materiality in ways that attend to how materiality relates to language and have also reconsidered the nature of language itself. We programmatically offer language materiality as an analytic for studying ethnographic contexts in which an explicit focus on materiality furthers understandings of language in use, and vice versa. Our goal in this volume is to develop a theory and methodology for examining language materially. This undertaking is ethnographically driven, premised 1

2

Language and Materiality

on a rethinking of the forms and presences that language takes in contemporary capitalism and the concomitant ethnographic contingencies needing further attention. The Analytic of Language Materiality Throughout this volume we ask: what happens when we regard language not as “immaterial” and existing in a referential or indexical sense to frame that which takes physical, tangible form, but rather as consisting of its own materiality? How might language exhibit material qualities, either alone or in conjunction with other registers of materiality? To regard linguistic practices and the ideologies that shape them as immaterial is to miss not only how language interacts with physical objects, environments, and forces but also to elide the material nature of linguistic practice itself – its sounds, shape, and material presences. What we find so compelling about regarding language materially is precisely how doing so can bring into focus the political economic as well as the sensual characteristics of language, its use, and forms. Williams’s (1977) insight that language is a “practical material activity” introduced earlier entails considering both the totality (as located within and part of political economic conditions) and simultaneity (as located within moments of meaning-making) of language use. Indeed, materialist analyses of language have brought to the fore the ways in which language is embedded within political economic structures and relations, whereas studies of language focusing on sound or orthography, for instance, have looked at the physical presence of language as an essential part of how it is experienced and made sense of (we discuss both of these tacks later). As Williams has argued, language both requires physical forms and plays a role in political economic relations – and, if viewed as constitutive material practice, can productively shed light on its materiality and advance Marxist analyses of human experience. Scholarship in the social sciences and humanities evidences a strong interest in materiality as a vital dimension of social life and signification, connecting issues as diverse as biopolitics, governmentality, consumption, and performance. Language, however, often receives short shrift in this scholarship. Some in literary criticism, philosophy, and other fields, for instance, critique the so-called linguistic turn for overshadowing materiality altogether (Coole and Frost 2010), while others view language-oriented research methods and data as too technical and inaccessible to nonspecialists and so limit their discussions of language to its referential or descriptive uses. Materiality is provocative precisely because of the many ways it has been and continues to be conceptualized. Some delineate materiality into two major schools of thought: (1) Marxist and other structurally oriented inquiries that focus on historical or dialectical materialism; and (2) phenomenological writings, such as explorations of

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

3

perception, embodiment, or the senses (see Kruks 2010). Language materiality offers a different ontology, in which the sensorium and Marxist political economy are intertwined. In doing so, it offers the potential for emergent frameworks and methodologies through which to understand political economy, technological infrastructures, and the production and circulation of value and meaning in contemporary capitalism. Overall, language-oriented scholarship has much to contribute to conversations about materiality through attention to areas such as affect, poetics, sound, and sentiment, as well as their underpinning ideologies, pragmatics, and metapragmatics. We build on a legacy that has not altogether overlooked the nature of the relationship between language and materiality. Of course, Marx and Engels, as well as many of the social theorists and other scholars who extended their ideas, were less interested in delving into the details of linguistic activity as material practice. Although much ethnographic work implicitly uses language as evidence of people’s ideas, beliefs, and values, and theoretical schools of thought in sociocultural anthropology have used linguistic structures as models, language use has rarely been a focus within cultural anthropological treatments of materiality. Similarly, materiality has not been a central theoretical occupation of much scholarly work on language. At the same time, we see suggestions over the last century of such a twin perspective. For instance, much of Edward Sapir’s and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s theories of language were premised on language’s relationships to objects, mental states, and modes of interpreting the physical world. In the 1950s and 1960s, attention to the physical world was also evident in studies of how language was understood to order reality through taxonomies of animals, spectrums of color, or kinship structures. Since the 1960s, linguistic anthropologists have attended to contexts of communication as shaping and being shaped by interaction, including the ethnography of speaking and ethnomethodology. Sociolinguists have sought to bring contextual variables, including class, race, gender, and place, to bear on an analysis of discourse, and studies foregrounding relationships between language and political economy directly take up materialist approaches, wherein language ideologies and use shape access to social power and wealth accumulation. Although linguistic anthropological work has drawn on the writings of C. S. Peirce (e.g., 1955) for decades, only recently have scholars of language begun to examine the materiality of Peircean “firstness” and qualia (qualities) as essential to the communication process. Indeed, a focus on the material forms of language can be seen as an entrée into the material conditions under which it is produced, encountered, and circulates. One of linguistic anthropology’s vital contributions to conversations about materiality is its focused and ethnographically grounded attention to the medium of communication and to the nature of its mediality. By medium, we mean anything that takes on or is given the ability to connect actors to one

4

Language and Materiality

another and/or to aspects of the contexts in which they move. Specifically, here we aim to draw attention to language as a medium that travels through select channels – via the voice, the page, the screen, the MP3 – and to emphasize that such forms matter to what it is and does. Focusing on the medium has been offered both as a counterpoint to mentalist approaches to language (Wittgenstein 1991; Schneider 2006) and as a way of understanding linguistic signification as a material process inseparable from other social activity (Coward and Ellis 1977; Voloshinov 1973). Mediality, a concept receiving increased attention in fields such as philosophy, art history, and media studies, often via its roots in Wittgenstein, is the quality, nature, and characteristics of the connections enabled by any particular medium – its mediation via a set of characterizing qualities and conditions. Language, per force, requires a medium, although the mediality of how this is instantiated within spatiotemporal moments will of course differ. So attention to the mediality of linguistic practice might involve looking at any number of moments or points of connection across and between events, contexts, people, and things while focusing on material aspects of this practice. Our use of the term “linguistic materiality” in exploring the construction of authenticity in contemporary capitalism (Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014) was meant to capture just this notion: that the material aspect of language as a medium may matter to what it is, does, and means. Language materiality broadens this perspective, including a focus on the medium, mediality, and other ways in which the linguistic and the material interact. Our development of this language materiality framework has been motivated at least in part by the recognition that language itself is changing in terms of the technologies that mediate our speaking, the globalizing processes that commodify it in previously unforeseen ways, and how we, as ethnographers, must attend to language use across the multiple, often simultaneous, modalities across which everyday communication now occurs. Linguistic anthropology is at a moment in which delimiting the communicative encounter to face-to-face interaction is not sufficient, if it ever was. Even when linguistic anthropologists have acknowledged the broader impact of globalization and other processes, ethnography has, until recently, remained focused on relatively small-scale, contained communities. Our own earlier projects, which focused on populations rooted in distinct locations – Silicon Valley and northern Italy – are cases in point. Even when our conceptualizations of these communities were complicated by diasporic media consumption and global circulations of heritage language revitalization discourses, respectively, they primarily examined language without attention to materiality (but see Shankar 2006, 2008; Cavanaugh 2005). As we undertook projects of broader scale across locations, we faced a conundrum: linguistic anthropology in large part still privileges the face-to-face communicative encounter; moreover, the emphasis on language ideologies has tended to privilege the nation-state and citizenship, potentially complicating

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

5

moves to look beyond it and engage the global. We are by no means suggesting that linguistic anthropologists and those involved in similar research shift focus away from face-to-face interaction, but rather that we should think deliberately about medium and form as shaping communication and potentially remaking the everyday encounter. In this sense, we find it productive to investigate explicitly what language has become, as well as how we study it anthropologically. The time is ripe for such an investigation because of the transformations wrought by global capitalism that shape the flows of people, information, and goods; by technological innovations, such as the growing ubiquity of cellphones and social media; and by political transformations; for example, recent revolutions in the Middle East or the grassroots activism emerging from events in Ferguson, Missouri, which involved crowd-sourced information and new types of mediated participation (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). All draw our attention to language materiality. We view this analytic as capacious enough to attend to language as expressed through a variety of material technologies such as texts, tweets, and snaps, as well as a variety of forms: fonts, ALL CAPS, and common abbreviations for digital text (“u” for you, “2” for to, and so on). What binds together these language materialities across different domains and invites their analysis with the conceptual toolkit we offer are the exigencies of how people now engage with language. With machines that autocorrect these very words as we type them on our screens, our utterances enter the world only partially of our own doing, mediating the ways our voices are now “heard” as much through technological means as they are through direct interaction. Mediated communicative practices may be experienced simultaneously the world over, but experiences of these practices also differ dramatically according to economically shaped possibilities of participation. With intelligence extending from devices that editorialize and geographically locate our utterances, as well as correct and limit us when we do not conform to preferred parameters, these anthropogenic technologies “strike back,” as Latour (2005) might say, in ways that make language materiality inseparable from the contextualized meaning of utterances and how they may circulate. What has become evident in our process of developing this volume is that as much as the theorizing of language and materiality has been conceptually unwieldy in the abstract, it has been methodologically challenging as well. Minding materiality is not a common lesson in linguistic anthropology; recording, transcribing, and conversational analysis are at best on the fringes of cultural anthropology and archaeology. Yet as linguistic anthropologists, we have to be aware of the materiality of our data (recordings, transcripts, fieldnotes), even as they add layers of observed context and significance to having been witness to the speech events in question, either as observer, participant, or both. The actions of revisiting and reviewing recordings, excerpting and arranging transcripts, and adding observable

6

Language and Materiality

metalinguistic data underscore the dynamic nature of recordings and what is possible with them. These activities may also, as they have done with us, serve to underline their very materiality. Although we do not mean to fetishize these forms of data, the importance of recorded data, sound, and notes – the very tools of linguistic anthropology – has trained our attention on materiality as practitioners of our subfield as much as it occurs as a vital aspect of our subject matter. For these reasons, we find this an ideal moment to advance new analytics and methodologies to study language materially. In the rest of this introduction, we flesh out our theory of language materiality and present a preview of the volume. We sought to include a range of voices, perspectives, and academic conversations in this book. Some take up materiality by attending to the form of language and its meanings: looking at language in terms of its sounds, the channels in which it occurs, or its objectifications. Others investigate the physical forms that surround language and with which it co-occurs, or take a materialist view that views linguistic practice and form via political economy. Several contributions take into account the medium of communication by pondering its materiality and the impact it has on how people encounter and use it. All engage with ongoing conversations in linguistic anthropology and allied fields, while seeking to advance broader scholarly understandings of what counts as material and why this might matter. Materiality and Culture Meanings of materiality are central to conceptualizing how humans encounter, experience, and interact with their surroundings. To discern those meanings involves studying perception and the relationship of bodies to time and space, as well as efforts to understand and/or conceptualize the relationship of human minds to their environments – via their bodies, their histories, their natural and built environments. Such inquiries are grounded in broader discussions about the relationship between subject and object, agency, and the nature of knowledge. These are not only philosophical questions but also anthropological ones, and anthropologists have often turned to philosophical insights in phenomenology to help them explore these issues. Phenomenology, which explores the nature of being from a variety of perspectives, examines materiality as it is experienced. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, sought to bring together knowledge and experience, to conceptualize the body’s experience of the world as active perception rather than as passive absorption. In doing so, he saw no Cartesian divide between the self and the world. Rather, humans inhabit and relate to the world through the body: “the unity of either the subject or the object is not a real unity, but a presumptive unity on the horizon of experience” (Merleau-Ponty 2013: 228).

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

7

Perception, in this view, is offered as the center of subjectivity, achieved through the interaction of a perceiving subject and the material world around them. The material, then, becomes relevant in how subjects experience it – through sitting at desks or walking in gardens, for example, as well as presumably through hearing voices or viewing documents – though such linguistic particulars generally fall outside the philosophical lens. For Merleau-Ponty and works that build on his philosophical insights, it makes sense to talk about the perception of, say, the color yellow, as causing certain affective responses, such as feelings of warmth, unmediated by the cultural semiotic systems within which color perception is embedded and through which such meanings are formed. As Silverstein and Keane (see Chapter 2) discuss, these views give scant attention to cultural diversity and variations in experience, but then assert, for instance, that “some series of inter-involvements is always encoded in the preliminary character of experience, flowing into the tone and color of perception” (Connolly 2010: 183). Other philosophers have taken up the issue of context – a vital issue in linguistic anthropology – in ways that interrogate what it is, how we relate to it, and how we can understand it. Heidegger’s endeavor to theorize humans’ place in space, or their relationship to particular locations, through the concept of “dwelling” has been helpful to this and similar efforts to conceptualize how humans live in the world. Dwelling, “the manner in which mortals are on the earth” (Heidegger 1971: 148), like perception for Merleau-Ponty, is active rather than passive. Human beings inhabit the world through building and creating dwelling places, sites where their actions produce a meaningful connection to locations. This process occurs at least in part through thinking about places, as Heidegger describes with his example of the old bridge at Heidelberg – if we imagine it, we are already there, dwelling there, perhaps even more so than those who pass it by every day, unthinking. Accordingly, the material can be experienced through memory and imagination as much as by interacting directly with it through talk, as Heidegger asserts, “The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken” (1971: 157, our emphasis). Heidegger regards speaking, then, as a process integral to his conception of how we interact with the material world. To speak of places and people’s relationship to them is part of dwelling, part of how the material is shared and made social (see Basso 1996). This largely referential conceptualization of language offers one way in which it may participate in linking experiencing subjects and the material world they inhabit: language – internally or externally experienced – may describe it and, in describing it, bring aspects of it experientially near (see Carnap 1937).1 Anthropologists have sought to bring a sense of sociality to bear on phenomenological debates, analyzing how culture may shape perception, as well as the conceptualization of subjects and objects (Jackson 1996;

8

Language and Materiality

Stoller 1997). In these studies, language is often seen as a mechanism for describing the world, similar to the strictly referential role of language as depicted by Heidegger. However, the relationship of language to the material can be far more capacious when the analytical lens is broadened to include its nonreferential functions, as much contemporary linguistic anthropology has shown; we seek to further complicate and broaden this relationship through a focus on language materiality. Debates about the role and meaning of materiality – generally as contrasted with some conception of immateriality, such as spirit or mind – have been central to important anthropological discussions, many of which continue to shape how we do anthropology, from the nature of ethnography to the theoretical frameworks we use (see Ingold 2012 for a review). One of the most central has been the ongoing divide between symbolic and materialist approaches to anthropology. What began as a difference between those who saw meaning as inhabiting material – and materialist – structures and those who sought to portray meaning as emergent from human interaction is the foundation, for instance, of contemporary struggles between cognitivists, who see meaning arising from brains and their conditioning, and social constructivists, who stress the variability of human experience and practice and the essential role of socialization in producing cultural differences. This divide has had and continues to have deep implications for how we conceive of the materiality of language, as well as the nature of anthropology and the study of humanity more broadly, issues expanded on by Keane and Silverstein (see Chapter 2). In the 1960s, symbolic anthropology emerged from efforts to unravel the material problem of understanding others’ schemes of comprehension, such as, for instance, regarding cargo cults, which had been portrayed as “irrational” when viewed from a Western, non-indigenous viewpoint. Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and other sociocultural anthropologists argued for understanding culture as the product of human activities that produce meaning. This move was also a response to prominent modes of thinking at the time, especially two that were most dominant: Noam Chomsky’s universalist conceptualizations of human mind and knowledge, embedded within behaviorist models of human activity, and Marvin Harris’s cultural materialist school of thought, which looked past human explanations for their behaviors to find meaning in the environmental base. This conflict among symbolic anthropological, cognitivist, and cultural materialist approaches to analyzing human action was rooted in very different conceptualizations of human subjectivity, a debate that in the Western scholarly tradition goes back at least to the work of Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and emerging traditions of empiricism (see Bauman and Briggs 2003, on aspects of this intellectual history). The conflict centered on such questions as how and where meaning gets created and where it exists. And, similar to Whorf’s conceptualization of worldview, symbolic anthropologists

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

9

went beyond the question of whether categories that make the world meaningful exist in the human mind to ponder whether they formed through interaction with the world. In some senses, symbolic anthropology shared an agenda with structuralism, which also argued that the material world could be made sense of through looking at the meanings that humans made of it. Although the two shared a commitment to investigating cultural patterns, what they did not share were their way of theorizing this meaning and their stance on whether such meaning was culturally specific or universally shared. For structuralists, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, inspired by the work of Saussure, meanings were organized into language-like structures, using phonological contrasts (that is, meaning as built through minimal differences across sounds and their placement within a system) as a model. The differences that such analyses captured were viewed as universal across humanity, a point of difference with Geertzian symbolic anthropology (Geertz 1973), which saw the webs of significance within which humanity swung to be culturally specific. For our purposes, it is interesting to note that matter, or the physical instantiation of things in the world, was implicated in structuralist inquiries in terms of its relation to systems of meaning, and it was taken into account when investigating meaning-making relationships between words and objects. Materiality itself, however, lurked just outside of the frame of these inquiries, serving as a background for meaningmaking or as the basis on which distinctions within systems of meaning could be discerned. The raw, the cooked, and the rotten, for Lévi-Strauss (1966), were less qualities that adhere to things in the world than idealized notions materialized within cultural settings that found meaning in contradistinction to one another. Whereas symbolic approaches to culture consolidated arguments that human subjectivity and experience are anchored in meaning-making, Chomsky’s views conceptualized language as a formal system apart from cultural or environmental specificities or forces, a perspective that became ascendant in linguistics for several decades. For many who studied language, the material and social world became merely a setting for gathering linguistic data, not an integral part of how language worked. At the same time, political economic understandings of human experience, cultural materialism among them, concentrated on the materialist conditions under which humans lived and worked, finding meaning not in what or how people spoke, but in what they did and how they interacted with the material world. What mattered was how many cattle they kept or what they ate, not the stories they told, the names they gave themselves and others, or the ways in which they argued. This legacy of materialism owes its debt to the agenda laid out by Marx and Engels. As quoted in the epigraph, they note that language is caught up in the material processes of production while it is also an essential dimension

10

Language and Materiality

of the “material intercourse” of everyday life. Arguing against the Hegelian view that ideas drive history, Marx and Engels’ conceptualization of a materialist perspective on history and social conditions sought to put what humans do, not what they think, at the center of social inquiry. Materialist analyses of language, many building on the work of Raymond Williams (1977) and Pierre Bourdieu (1977), have been one arena in which the linguistic and the material have received equal attention. Both emphasized the role of language in shaping ideology and political economy, focusing their analytical gaze on how language is embedded within or plays a part in political economies. Williams sought to bring language within the purview of Marxist analyses and accordingly theorized it as both activity and permeated with history. As such, language could be seen as embedded within and participating in ideological formations and political economic processes. Bourdieu included language in his conceptualization of class formation and maintenance, placing it firmly within the marketplace as a form of capital. Materiality is also a lens through which consumption and material culture studies emerged. Commodity consumption has been a fascination to those wishing to understand the indexical value of objects and their circulation, especially as this pertains to social value. Early work on conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1953), as well as other engagements with commodities, was rarely about objects alone, but about the material and social worlds of meaning in which they signaled prestige (Bourdieu 1984). The Birmingham school of cultural studies, for instance, examined how commodities were instrumental in the construction of subcultural styles and critical resistance (Hall and Jefferson 1993; Hebdige 1979). Taking a decidedly materialist, Marxist perspective on social reproduction (Willis 1977), members of this school highlighted the role of commodities in broader processes of social category formation. Commodities themselves could have “social lives” (Appadurai 1986), a formulation gesturing to the agency of material culture and its circulation (Gell 1986, 1988; Latour 1993). Even though these studies did not foreground language use, some conceived of consumption itself as a system of communicative signs (Baudrillard 1988). Though a “nonverbal medium” (Douglas and Isherwood 1996: 41), semiotic processes of iconicity and indexicality signaled consumption’s semiotic potential – a point developed via a different intellectual lineage by anthropologists invested in semiotic anthropology (see Part I). Consumption has been an intellectual preoccupation for several decades in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology, among others; since the 1990s, anthropology has transitioned from a focus on commodities to material culture more broadly. Due in part to conceptions of materiality drawn from archaeology, via Daniel Miller (1998, 2005), as well as those of prominent art worlds and exchange theory, material culture studies encompasses the value and agency of objects in social systems of exchange as well as in capitalist

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

11

markets (see Hauser 2014). “Consumption” remains in central use in studies of communications, marketing, and advertising, but material culture studies allow for a more varied look at objects in social life beyond commodities, including their production. Myers’s (2002) extensive work on aboriginal art worlds, for instance, blurred the boundaries between art and commodity, complicating notions of authenticity and value. As Miller (1998) puts it, why certain things matter and what people do with them are vital anthropological questions that set this discipline’s look at materiality apart from those who regard materiality via metaphysical avenues of individual perception and experience. For instance, Annette Weiner’s (1992) “keeping while giving” allows us to rethink questions of objects and ownership in the Trobriand Islands. “Hard words,” as noted by Weiner (1984), are used in contests of ownership, suggesting that the relationship between language, materiality, and value is never about objects alone. Taking up similar questions of objectification and value, Nancy Munn’s (1986) study of the Gawa extends the Peircean concept of qualisign as a way to reconceptualize the ways value is signified through a material and social framework. Studies of materiality and culture have attended to communication and signification as central to theorizing the relationship between subject and object. Whether arguing against the Cartesian divide between self and world or investigating the nature of agency and experience, many of these theorists take up materiality as social and embedded. Perception is an active element of being, and the materiality of place can be experienced in a number of ways. Anthropologists extended this conversation by attending to how culture shapes perception, complicating the categories through which people make sense of the material. Whether through symbolic understandings of culture or materialist emphases steeped in political economy, the materiality of things, and their materialist significance, reveals the deep importance of communication in understanding material culture. Considering Language Materially Although investigations of the relationship between language and materiality have not been an explicit goal in linguistic anthropology, a thread runs through the study of language use that has attended to the material, dating back at least, for instance, to Malinowski’s (1965) documentation of verbal magic spells in yam gardening. In their efforts to uncouple perceived links between language, culture, and biology/race, Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Whorf each portrayed language as a mental process, which shaped minds and perceptions but was not necessarily grounded in any material presence (see Irvine’s afterword for more on this point). For Whorf, linguistic relativity was produced within designated environments, where “empty” gas cans could still ignite,

12

Language and Materiality

though language was still an internal process that was accessible only via certain external actions. Although inquiries about language and worldview did not emphasize space or experience as theoretical issues per se, they were definitive with regard to the connections between language and place, which were not generalizable outside the cultural and linguistic conditions of which they were born. Likewise, later investigations of worldview looked at how language represents the material and ideological world through culturally specific terminologies and taxonomies (see, for instance, Conklin’s classic study of color terms among the Hanunóo [1955], as well as Bulmer’s work on animal classification in New Guinea [1967]). In a different vein, Keith Basso’s (1996) iconic study of language and landscape illustrates a similar connection, exploring how language, location, and topography are intertwined in social and historical meaning-making for the Apache. Basso’s attention to the context or setting in which language is used emerges from and exemplifies the ethnography of communication, which emphasizes the importance of focusing on physical contexts of speaking and the objects that might be paired with varieties of talk, as well as the emergent meanings and effects of such talk. Ethnography of communication studies stress the importance of including the grog as well as the gossip (Brenneis 1984), the longhouse as well as the narratives (Sherzer 1979). Language socialization shares this methodological orientation, including caregivers’ and novices’ attention to and negotiations around food, tools, and other types of objects in order to understand the culturally specific processes of becoming in which these objects played a role (Ochs and Schieffelin 2001). Likewise, conversation analysis, as done by Marjorie and Charles Goodwin (among others, see Goodwin, Goodwin, and Yaeger-Dror 2002), includes physical elements of context as they are made relevant to interaction through speech, such as bottle caps and hopscotch squares. Although none of these studies has explicitly theorized materiality and language per se, their inclusion of both within the same methodological and analytic frameworks demonstrates how intertwined the two may be. Context itself, as an emergent achievement, has been an important topic of investigation in linguistic anthropology, in terms of both its temporal and physical dimensions (Duranti and Goodwin 1992; cf. Agha 2007; Irvine 2001; Silverstein 2003). Much of the work on context is informed by Goffman’s seminal effort to break open and systematize participation roles in order to complicate understandings of the nature of participation, in terms of the distribution of roles, as well as how these roles unfold within certain times and places. Such work has built on Goffman’s insights concerning how speakers draw on a range of semiotic resources, both linguistic and material, as they engage in what Duranti (1997: 330) calls “the problem of establishing and maintaining a particular version of the social world.” Gumperz’s (1977) notion

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

13

of contextualization cues took up this question from another angle, examining how speakers made elements of their speaking environment relevant to interlocutors, whether they were successful in this endeavor or not. Contextualization cues may involve material features of speech, such as pitch or volume changes, and may link ongoing speaking practices to changing environmental factors, including speakers’ uptake of aspects of their interlocutors’ comportment, dress, and other elements of appearance. What these analytical endeavors share is an implicit integration of language use – mainly talk – not only with material features of that talk but also with physical elements of their environment, from gestures to the seating arrangement of speakers. Attending to the materiality of context alongside language use has also meant investigating how bits of texts, spoken or written, circulate across and among contexts; namely, a focus on intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Agha and Wortham 2005; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Hall 2005). Work in this area has involved tracking how “text artifacts” (Silverstein and Urban 1996) travel across contexts and determining what types of transformations this process entails. Here materiality can be drawn into linguistic analyses through attention to its mediality, the material forms of the text(s) in question (if it is shouted or whispered, how it is stored, or whether its pages mildew along the way), as well as through focusing on how linguistic contexts support, complicate, or even prevent circulation. Conceptualizing the potential mobility and circulations of texts owes much to V. N. Voloshinov’s (1973) writings, specifically on the multiaccentuality of the sign, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of heteroglossia. Both offer ways to theorize how linguistic signs of various sorts resonate with multiple meanings, the variation of which is shaped by the contexts in which utterances are deployed. Voloshinov and Bakhtin share a Marxist view on language and signification, which conceptualized context as suffused with power, inequalities, and histories. Language never exists outside of these material conditions or apart from its moments of deployment. As mentioned earlier, Pierre Bourdieu also worked from a Marxist perspective to develop the concept of the linguistic market to account for how language(s) not only reflects but also reproduces social hierarchies and power differentials. His work has been extensively taken up by scholars working on the intersections of language and labor, political economies, and structures of power. Although some have astutely complicated Bourdieu’s (1991) portrayal of the linguistic marketplace and characterization of language as symbolic capital (e.g., Heller 1988; Irvine 1989; Swigart 2001; Woolard 1985), his basic insight that language is embedded and circulates within systems of political, economic, social, and cultural distinction has been foundational to theorizing materialist treatments of language. Susan Gal (1987, 1989) and Paul Friedrich (1989), for instance, focused on the relationships between language and

14

Language and Materiality

political economic structures as mediated by ideology to explore how speakers’ linguistic choices can be understood as expressive of their consciousness of their locations within regional political economies. Studies of language ideologies (Woolard 1998; Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998) broadened and elaborated this focus, training their analytical gaze on linguistic structures and language use in culturally specific contexts to examine how language interacts with ideology and how it both presupposes and entails social value, meaning, and, potentially, change. Much of this scholarship focused on nationalist and postcolonial projects and structures, investigating, for example, how efforts to build a nation-state involved linguistic policies and practices (Cavanaugh 2009; Errington 2007; Jaffe 1999) or how colonial projects were almost always linguistic ones as well (Irvine and Gal 2000). These views of language in use incorporated dimensions of materiality into their methodological and/or analytic frames, attending to features of the material world as informing linguistic practices or emerging from them. Conversely, language and worldview theorized an essential relationship between linguistic structures and patterns and how speakers encounter their material environment. Materialist perspectives, bringing political economic frames of analysis to bear, used the lenses of ideology, the linguistic marketplace, or structures of political economic power to illuminate dimensions of what language is and does. Language ideologies incorporated speakers’ understandings of their linguistic practices and positionings alongside other types of linguistic and ethnographic data, and offered a way to look beyond face-to-face communication and see language as embedded within national and regional political economies. All offer valuable perspectives on how to think about language materially through its interplay with material objects or locations; the emergent nature of its relationship to context; or its essential connections to political economic structures, processes, and ideologies. Current Conversations and Future Directions As we move toward the research chapters and commentaries in this volume, we situate this discussion in current work that has taken up relevant topics such as sound, signification, and circulation. Elaborating on Roman Jakobson’s (1960) conceptualization of the poetic function of language, work on embodiment and voice has linked “the materiality of sound to the sociality of vocal practice” (Feld, Fox, Porcello, and Samuels 2006: 340; see also Fox 2004; Novak and Sakakeeney 2015; Shankar 2016). Language and embodiment have also been viewed from the point of view of socialization (Fader 2009) and aesthetics (Feld 1988, 2012, see Chapter 7, this volume; see also Bucholtz and Hall 2016; Cavanaugh 2009; Faudree 2012, 2013; Webster 2009), focusing on how language is integrated into the emotional and bodily experience of aesthetics, using signifying practices as evidence of aesthetic systems (Webster 2015).

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

15

The nature of signification has been a point of focus for linguistic anthropology since at least Silverstein’s (1976) foundational work on shifters and indexicality, much of it built on the work of Charles C. Peirce. Relevant for our purposes is that Peirce’s theorization of signs supports analyses of both the material and verbal dimensions of signification. Peircean “firstness,” for instance, expressed through icons, qualisigns, and rhemes, relies heavily on form for signification and is illustrative for understanding language ideologies and use, as suggested by Irvine and Gal’s concept of “iconization” (Irvine and Gal 2000), which they later revised as “rhematization” (Gal 2005). Likewise investigations of “qualia” (from ‘qualisign’) in contexts of language use have yielded insights about how characterological features of speakers shaped by language ideology and register use are as much conveyed through qualia, or qualities, as they are through indexicality or reference (Chumley and Harkness 2013; Gal 2013). As an analytic, indexicality has been used to illuminate how social difference and hierarchy are enacted and produced within interaction, as scholars have studied the traces of social interactions not only within transcripts but also in archaeological contexts and artifacts (see, for example, Bauer 2013). Semiotic approaches have been especially attuned to the interplay of objects and words in the construction of meaning as part of broader systems of semiosis, such as Keane’s (2003, 2007) conceptualization of “semiotic ideology (see also Kockelman 2006; Lee and LiPuma 2002; Murphy 2015; Wirtz 2014). Peirce’s insight about the dynamic coexistence of verbal and material dimensions of meaning-making, and how indexes, for instance, presuppose and entail context not just through words but also through the materiality of other signs, is taken up by authors in this volume, including Cavanaugh and Manning. Other work has explicitly connected the material and verbal dimensions of signification (Lee 1997; Manning and Meneley 2008), at times capitalizing on how such an analytic suggests a nonteleological relationship between language and materiality, one in which meaning is mutually constituted (e.g., Mertz and Parmentier 1985; Munn 1986; Myers 2001). The emerging focus on language and food as interrelated phenomena productively investigated in tandem (Cavanaugh et al. 2014; Riley 2012; Riley and Cavanaugh 2017) draws attention to how each may be signifying media, achieving meaning and value together or at odds with one another. Semiotic studies also interrogate the linguistic landscapes within which languages circulate and take form (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010, also see Chapters 3 and 10, this volume). The concept of performativity has also been generative in semiotic discussions of the relationship between the linguistic and the material, building on Austin’s (1962) original conceptualization of performative language as an agent of change in the world, Derrida’s (1985) work on the iterability of the sign, and Butler’s (1990) elaboration of performativity to describe the ongoing, processual nature of subject formation. The construction of gender and sexuality has been especially studied using Butler’s analytic, in terms of how masculinity

16

Language and Materiality

is achieved through interaction (Cameron 1997), for instance, or how access to scarce resources and political recognition is caught up in the performative construction of transgender bodies (Valentine 2003). Analyses of brands and branding from the point of view of performativity have shown how the signification of commodities is transformed as they move across contexts of use and representation (Moore 2003; Nakassis 2012; Shankar 2015). One of our goals in this volume is to bring semiotic perspectives on language and materiality to engage with questions of power and inequality and their instantiations – more intuitively and commonly addressed in materialist works – as taken up in Heller’s commentary and Irvine’s afterword. Scholarship on global capitalism has illustrated the heightened significance of materiality in an era where domestic and foreign policy agendas are ever more visibly dominated by profitable capital accumulation and the commodification of culture (Harvey 2005: 7; cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Works on language commodification (exemplified in Duchêne and Heller 2012) – focused on call centers (Cameron 2000; Heller 2003; Holborow 2015), tourism (Heller et al. 2014), and language planning (Del Percio 2016; Urla 2012) – have explicitly argued that current global political economic conditions have given risen to unforeseen modes of and possibilities for the commodification of language (Blommaert 2010; Cavanaugh 2016; Coupland 2010; Dickinson 2010; Kelly-Holmes 2010). Although language commodification and language materiality perspectives share an organizing interest in the political economic environments within which language is deployed, as well as in how political economic structures and processes shape language, commodification is not synonymous with materiality (for an elaboration see Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). We believe that an explicit focus on the materiality of language would generate new directions to this conversation, through, for instance, the detailed consideration of work and exchange, the inclusion of the sensual elements of language use, the alignment or conflict between language and objects that may populate the same or similar marketplaces, and attention to how some linguistic forms find quantitative monetary value within a marketplace, an acute point raised in Heller’s commentary and Coupland and Kelly-Holmes’s Chapter 9. As many of the chapters here suggest, language commoditization and circulation within national boundaries differ from ways in which they occur within globalized flows of capital and structures of power (see Chapters 3, 7, and 11, this volume). Examinations of the material dimensions of linguistic mediality and mediation illustrate changing infrastructures of communication. As linguistic objectifications circulate via media technologies and are taken up in new contexts, they may transform social meanings, relationships, and values, as well as form connections between everyday contexts of talk and other types of circulation (McIntosh 2010; Miller 2011; c.f. Shankar 2006). Scrutinizing linguistic features as they are used within mediated contexts, such as Jones and Schieffelin’s

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

17

(2009) work on how college students have taken up be + like quotative forms in their Instant Messaging, demonstrates abiding connections across face-toface communication and mediated communicative events, as well as transformations that linguistic features may undergo linked to the materiality of keyboards and emoticons. Conversely, text artifacts from film may be voiced within face-to-face interaction to achieve certain conversational goals, as in Shankar’s (2004) analysis of South Asian teenagers’ use of Bollywood movie talk in their everyday life, and the materiality of the media within which text artifacts are embedded may an essential part of what they mean and how they can and do travel (see Eisenlohr 2010). Overall, our goal is to demonstrate how looking at language materially can enhance our understandings of how language is integrated into contemporary capitalist systems; we also aim to complement ongoing efforts to expand semiotic understandings of contemporary experience. There is certainly more to say about topics potentially relevant to language and materiality, but that could not be included in this volume. We hope this work will provoke further conversation and scholarship. Volume Overview The chapters that follow take different forms: research essays, theoretically oriented comments, a curated conversation, and an afterword. The research essays are original works bringing together ethnographic and other types of empirical data with theoretical analysis. The comments, shorter and more theoretically focused, take up topics relevant to language and materiality. Irvine’s afterword revisits the very issue at the heart of this volume, first introduced in her seminal article, “When Talk Isn’t Cheap” (Irvine 1989). The “curated conversation” is an edited transcript of a semistructured interview we recorded with Webb Keane and Michael Silverstein at the 2013 American Anthropological Association annual meetings. We invited Keane and Silverstein to reflect on materiality and its history within anthropology, as well as how such conversations dovetail with current semiotic projects in linguistic anthropology. Both have written extensively on these topics, and the conversation that emerged is far-reaching, ranging from Lévi-Strauss’s engagement with Roman Jakobson’s conceptions of language, to current cognitivist views on the nature of language. It is also a materialized trace of a fleeting interaction that was multiply transformed as it was captured in a digital audio-recording, transcribed, and edited to enhance its readability – making it more textlike and less like an interaction (with all the requisite interruptions, repairs, overlaps, and humorous asides, such as the comment by Silverstein we took as the title, “Materiality: It’s the Stuff!”). We have strived to preserve some of its interactive nature as an unfolding conversation, balanced against the needs of readers to be able to encounter it as a text on the page.

18

Language and Materiality

Part I, “Texts, Objects, Mediality,” brings together chapters focused on the materiality of language texts and the mediality of different forms of language. It explores how the media of language and paths of circulation within which it circulates may be influenced by but also shape their material forms, which are encountered and evaluated in numerous ways. Laura Miller’s chapter, “Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year: Commodified Language Forms in Multiple Contexts,” examines representations in the form of trendy words and kanji characters as they are valued and circulate through a variety of types of contests. It analyzes the objectification and commodification of these linguistic forms and explores the ways in which mass cultural attention to linguistic objectifications provides often odd and transitory expressions with new meanings and uses that allow multiple border crossings. Keith Murphy’s chapter, “Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language,” delves into the materiality of text as mediated controversies over fonts (“fontroversies”) have erupted over the perceived match of fonts to their contexts of use. Across the three cases he examines, there is an expectation of text-typeface matching – that the form of the typeface will match the intended message through iconic alignment of the two. Murphy analyzes the ways in which typeface subsists as a critical, and decidedly non-neutral, materialization of language, which in turn has implications for how language as a semiotic system interfaces with other semiotic systems in the everyday world. Shalini Shankar’s chapter on the National Spelling Bee, “Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling,” illustrates the language materiality of competitive language arts. She considers the materiality of language itself, focusing on the form and sound of letters and words, while also exploring how objectification and brand are integral to how spelling bees are circulated via broadcast and social media. Central to this languagestandardization exercise is the relationship spellers develop to the form of words and how they participate in the shared material culture of the bee. Writings in Part II, “Transformation, Aesthetics, Embodiment,” address the materiality of language vis-à-vis its material presences and shape. Jillian Cavanaugh’s chapter, “How the Sausage Gets Made: Food Safety and the Mediality of Talk, Documents, and Food Practices,” looks at the mediality of talk, documents, and food practices at a northern Italian meat-processing company. She analyzes these as performative, working together (or sometimes at crosspurposes) to construct food safety via moments of reflexivity. Food safety, requiring the alignment of these three labor modalities, emerges as a contingent and complex achievement, revealing the uneasy integrations of material and linguistic modalities of production required by global capitalism. Steven Feld’s chapter, “‘Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!’: How Honk Horns Voice the Acoustic Materiality of Reputation in Accra,” illustrates the dynamic interplay between transience, durability, and permanence to argue that sound

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

19

and voice are as material as objects and, as such, can circulate. The chapter focuses on lorry drivers and musicians in Accra, Ghana, exploring how sound rematerializes in echoic hearings, in repetitions, and in multiple mediations of technologies of recording and sampling, such that sound and voice are as material as por por horns. Patrick Eisenlohr’s chapter, “Transduction in Religious Discourse: Vocalization and Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices,” draws on ethnographic research about Muslim devotional practices in Mauritius to investigate material aspects of discourse circulation in religious settings, above all issues of vocalization and transduction. In treating sound reproduction technologies as covering gaps between authoritative sources and local instantiations of a devotional prayer genre, the chapter shows how users are guided by the assumption that sound reproduction, if working properly, is a medium that erases its own traces, despite the complex sequence of transductions it actually entails. Part III, “Time, Place, Circulation,” brings together writings that focus on how instantiations of language materiality are grounded within sociohistorical timeframes and contextualized within specific locales. At the same time, global flows and forces contribute to how language is materialized or works together with material objects to produce meaning and value. Nikolas Coupland’s and Helen Kelly-Holmes’s chapter, “Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery: Materialization as Metacultural Transformation,” takes a critical perspective on “peripheral multilingualism” to illustrate how two businesses – one Welsh, one Irish – promote and celebrate localism in their marketing, in part through selective use of what they call “small languages” and traditional iconography. They argue that elements of Welsh and Irish used in marketing discourses (and occasionally as material elements of products themselves) add value for these products, showing that globalization, mediatization, and commodification are not always-and-only threats to small languages, whatever their other undesirable consequences. Crispin Thurlow’s and Adam Jaworski’s chapter, “Word-things and Thingwords: The Transmodal Production of Privilege and Status,” focuses on elite travel and its signifiers, employing multimodal social semiotics in its analysis of the “thingification of words” and the “wordification of things.” They draw on their extensive research on super-elite travel to identify the material signs that signal eliteness and its hierarchies (such as luggage tags, birthday cards, and red carpets), as well as the language used to portray this elite world. They examine how they themselves are drawn into this world, awash with linguistic and material indexicals of class privilege, as a way to highlight how fine a line may be drawn – if at all – between these two. Robert Moore’s chapter, “Language and Materiality in the Renaming of Indigenous North American Languages and Peoples,” explores types of

20

Language and Materiality

linguistic and material transformations, analyzing performative renominations of Native North American groups. These accomplish several things at once: by putting the new names into wide circulation in several media (print, the internet, spoken discourse), they seem to turn the “inside” of these linguistic communities “out,” as well as promote certain historical trajectories over others. This renaming of languages and speakers is a global phenomenon, illustrating the intertwining of language and materiality in political economies that link local communities in North America and elsewhere with global circulations of value. Paul Manning’s chapter, “The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia,” brings together the linguistic and the material to analyze ritual drinks in the country of Georgia. Drinks that are aligned with a linguistic genre, the toast, are allocated ecologically, as well as culturally: mountain regions can produce only beer or vodka locally, and one of these is the ritual drink, whereas in the plains, wine generally takes pride of place. These preferences are driven in part by ecological networks of indexical and iconic figurations that link language to nonlanguage, with different consequences for the relations of drink to talk, systems of meaning-making that are currently in flux. Manning offers the theoretical concept of “semiotic ecology” as a metaphor suitable for a semiotic arrangement that is emergent, when things are changing, falling apart, or being assembled on the fly. We have grouped a series of concise theory-driven essays into Part IV, “More Stuff: Short Topical Commentaries on Language and Materiality.” These pieces align with the larger themes captured across the research chapters, but also represent more pointed, focused takes on topics particularly relevant to the issue of language and materiality. Monica Heller’s comment, “Can Language Be a Commodity?” takes a materialist perspective to focus on the issue of the commodification of language. She asks about the possibilities of language commodification and, building on Bourdieu and other theorists, urges investigations of which forms of communicative practice may become commodified and under what circumstances. Paja Faudree’s comment, “Language, Music, Materiality (and Immateriality): Entanglements Beyond the “Symbolic,”” locates voice and technological mediation at the center of her inquiry into the interconnections between materiality, music, and language. Scholarship on each has offered ways to transcend Cartesian dualities between mind and body, material and immaterial. At the same time, Faudree urges us to retain the immaterial within our analytic toolkit, for grappling ethnographically with the material, perhaps especially as it informs distinction between or bridges among language, music, and other categories of expression, and may lead us to contemplate the intangible, ephemeral and fleeting.

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

21

Mary Bucholtz’s comment, “Why Bodies Matter,” views embodiment and language from a feminist perspective to analyze the problematic relationship between language and physical violence. It takes as its starting point a case of mass murder in Santa Barbara, California, and argues that focusing on language use as inherently embodied and thus material is a valuable step toward a politically engaged linguistic anthropology. Jennifer Dickinson’s comment, “Physicality and Texts: Rematerializing the Transparent,” focuses on orthography and scripts to examine dimensions of the materiality of writing, such as script choice, color, and physical properties of text. Dickinson argues that a focus on the materiality of writing may also provide evidence of the technologies of their production, and introduce issues of legibility, readability, and interpretability. Mark Hauser’s comment, “History, Artifacts, and the Language of Culture Change in Archaeology,” brings an archaeologist into this conversation. He examines the moment when the linguistic concept of creolization was taken up in archaeology. For archaeologists, creolization was a model for social change and transformation built around the blending of cultural elements. Especially for Caribbean archaeology, which was interested in understanding colonial and slave-based populations, creolization provided a compelling way to theorize material assemblages that showed influences from a range of cultural backgrounds. Hauser argues that the value of creolization for archaeology was that it had a certain materiality for archaeologists, and allowed for a dynamic imagining of the colonial past and its boundaries. The final piece in this volume, Judith Irvine’s afterword, “Materiality and Language, or Material Language? Dualisms and Embodiments,” asks a key question: should language and materiality continue to be thought of separately, or is it possible to eliminate this dualism from the scholarly consciousness? Irvine traces an intellectual history of philosophical and anthropological arguments, from Saussure to Boas and Sapir, to assess the conditions under which it is possible to bring language and materiality together. Her meditation on if and how such a project can be done serves as a valuable way to wrap up the volume, urging us to incorporate the political economic and the semiotic into our analyses and research in order to understand the complexities of how the linguistic and the material interact in our heavily mediated, globalized world. N OT E S 1 Such an exclusive focus on the referential function of language is shared across many philosophical endeavors that take up language, including by logical positivists such as Carnap (1937) who sought a language that could perfectly and transparently represent truth.

22

Language and Materiality

REFERENCES Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Agha, Asif, and Stanton Wortham, eds. 2005. Special Issue, Discourse across Speech Events: Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Social Life. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1). Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Basso, Keith. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Selected Writings/Jean Baudrillard. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bauer, Alexander A. 2013. “Objects and their Glassy Essence: Semiotics of Self in the Early Bronze Age Black Sea.” Signs and Society 1. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonilla, Yarimar and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States.” American Ethnologist 42(1):4–17. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. “The Economics of Linguistic Exchange.” Social Science Information 16(6):645–668. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by J. B. Thompson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brenneis, Don. 1984. “Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon: Style and Substance in Fiji Indian Conversation.” American Ethnologist 11(3):487–506. Briggs, Charles L., and Richard Bauman 1992. “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2):131–172. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2016. “Embodied Sociolinguistics.” In Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates, edited by Nikolas Coupland, 173–197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bulmer, Ralph. 1967. “Why is the Cassowary Not a Bird? A Problem of Zoological Taxonomy among the Karam of the New Guinea Highlands.” Man 2(1):5–25. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cameron, Deborah. 1997. Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity. In Language and Masculinity, edited by Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell. 2000. “Styling the Worker: Gender and the Commodification of Language in the Globalized Service Economy.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(3):323–347.

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

23

Carnap, Rudolf. 1937. Logical Syntax of Language. Vol. 4. Psychology Press. Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2005. “Accent Matters: The Material Consequences of Sounding Local in Northern Italy.” Language and Communication 25(2):127– 148. 2009. Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. 2016. “Talk as Work: Economic Sociability in Northern Italian Heritage Food Production.” Language and Communication 48:41–52. Cavanaugh, Jillian R., Kathleen C. Riley, Alexandra Jaffe, Christine Jourdan, Martha Karrebæk, and Amy Paugh. 2014. “What Words Bring To the Table: The Linguistic Anthropological Toolkit as Applied to the Study of Food.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24(1):84–97. Cavanaugh, Jillian R., and Shalini Shankar. 2014. “Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value.” American Anthropologist 116(1):51–64. Chumley, Lily Hope, and Nicholas Harkness, eds. 2013. Special Issue on Qualia. Anthropological Theory 13(1–2). Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conklin, Harold C. 1955. Hanunóo Color Categories. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 11(4):339–344. Connolly, William E. 2010. “Materialities of Experience.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 178–200. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coupland, Nikolas J. R., ed. 2010. Handbook of Language and Globalization. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Coward, R., and E. Ellis. 1977. Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Self. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Del Percio, Alfonso. 2016. “Nation Brands and the Politics of Difference.” Signs and Society 4(S1):1–28. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “Signature Event Context.” In Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, 307–330. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dickinson, Jennifer. 2010. “Languages for the Market, the Nation, or the Margins: Overlapping Ideologies of Language and Identity in Zakarpattia.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language (201):53–78. Douglas, M., and B. Isherwood. 1996. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Routledge. Duchêne, Alexandre, and Monica Heller, eds. 2012. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit. New York: Routledge. Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, Alessandro, and Charles Goodwin, eds. 1992. Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

24

Language and Materiality

Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2010. “Materialities of Entextualization: The Domestication of Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(2):314–333. Errington, J. Joseph. 2007. Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning and Power. New York: Blackwell. Fader, Ayala. 2009. Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Faudree, Paja. 2012. “Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:519–536. 2013. Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Feld, Steve. 1988. “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-Up-Over Sounding’: Getting into the Kaluli Groove.” Yearbook of Traditional Music 20:74–113. 2012 [1982]. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 3rd ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Feld, Steven, Aaron A. Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels. 2006. Vocal Anthropology: From the Music of Language to the Language of Song. In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 321–345. Oxford: Blackwell. Fox, Aaron A. 2004. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Friedrich, Paul. 1989. “Language, Ideology, and Political Economy.” American Anthropologist 91(2):295–312. Gal, Susan. 1987. “Code Switching and Consciousness in the European Periphery.” American Ethnologist 14(4):637–653. 1989. “Language and Political Economy.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18:345– 367. 2005. “Language Ideologies Compared: Metaphors of Public/Private.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):23–37. 2013. “Tastes of Talk: Qualia and the Moral Flavor of Signs.” Anthropological Theory 13(1/2):31–48. Gell, Alfred. 1986. “Newcomers to the World of Goods: Consumption among the Muria Gonds.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Social Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 110–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Goodwin, Marjorie H., Charles Goodwin, and Malcah Yaeger-Dror. 2002. “MultiModality in Girls’ Game Disputes.” Journal of Pragmatics 34:1621–1649. Gumperz, John J. 1977. “Sociocultural Knowledge in Conversational Inference.” Linguistics and Anthropology, 76:785–98. Hall, Kira. 1995. “Lip Service on the Fantasy Lines.” In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, edited by Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz, 183– 216. London: Routledge. 2005. “Intertextual Sexuality: Parodies of Class, Identity, and Desire in Limnal Delhi.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):125–44. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1993 [1976]. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Routledge.

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

25

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hauser, Mark W. 2014. “Land, Labor and Things: Surplus in a New West Indian Colony (1763–1807).” Economic Anthropology 1(1):49–65. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Building, Dwelling, Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 143–161. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Heller, Monica. 1988. Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2003. “Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4):473–492. Heller, M., J. Pujolar, and A. Duchêne. 2014. “Linguistic Commodification in Tourism.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(40):539–566. Holborow, Marnie. 2015. Language and Neoliberalism. London: Routledge. Ingold, Timothy. 2012. “Toward an Ecology of Materials.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:427–442. Irvine, Judith T. 1989. “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy.” American Ethnologist 16(2):248–267. 2001. ““Style” as Distinctiveness: The Culture and Ideology of Linguistic Differentiation.” In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, edited by P. Eckert and J. R. Rickford, 21–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In Regimes of Language. Ideologies, Politics, and Identities, edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 35–83. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Jackson, Michael, ed. 1996. Things as They Are. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by T. Sebeok, 350–359. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jaffe, Alexandra. 1999. Ideologies in Action: Language Politics in Action. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jaworski, Adam, and Crispin Thurlow, eds. 2010. Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Bloomsbury. Jones, Graham, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 2009. “Enquoting Voice, Accomplishing Talk: Uses of Be + Like in Instant Messaging.” Language and Communication 29(1):77–113. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language and Communication 23(2–3):409–425. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kelly-Holmes, H. 2010. “Markets and Languages: Sociolinguistic Perspectives.” In Language and the Market, edited by Helen Kelly-Holmes and Gerlinde Mautner, 20–29. Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan. Kockelman, Paul. 2006. “A Semiotic Ontology of the Commodity.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16(1):76–102. Kroskrity, Paul V., ed. 2000. Regimes of Language. Ideologies, Politics, and Identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

26

Language and Materiality

Kruks, Sonia. 2010. “Simone de Beauvoir: Engaging Discrepant Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 258–280. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Tranlated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking Heads: Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lee, Benjamin, and E. LiPuma. 2002. “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity.” Public Culture 14(1):191–213. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. “The Culinary Triangle.” New Society (London), December 22:937–940. Malinowski, B. 1965. Coral Gardens and Their Magic: Soil-Tilling and Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Manning, Paul, and Anne Meneley. 2008. “Material Objects in Cosmological Worlds: An Introduction.” Ethnos 73(3):285–302. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1970 [1846]. The German Ideology: Part One with Selections from Parts Two and Three, Together with Marx’s Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy. Edited by C. J. Arthur. New York: International Publishing. McIntosh, Janet. 2010. “Mobile Phones and Mohopo’s Prophesy: The Powers and Danger of Flying Language.” American Ethnologist 37(2):337–353. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2013. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge. Mertz, Elizabeth, and Richard Parmentier, eds. 1985. Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychosocial Perspectives. New York: Academic Press. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1998. “Why Some Things Matter.” In Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, edited by Daniel Miller, 3–21. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Laura. 2011. “Subversive Script and Novel Graphs in Japanese Girls’ Culture.” Language and Communication 31:16–26. Moore, Robert E. 2003. “From Genericide to Viral Marketing: On “Brand.”” Language and Communication 23:331–357. Munn, Nancy D. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinean) Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Murphy, Keith M. 2015. Swedish Design: An Ethnography. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Myers, Fred. 2001. “Introduction: The Empire of Things.” In The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, edited by Fred Myers, 3–63. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. 2002. Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nakassis, Constantine V. 2012. “Brand, Citationality, Performativity.” American Anthropologist 114(4):624–638. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeney. 2015. Keywords in Sound. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 2001. “Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and their Implications.” In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 263–301. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction

27

Peirce, Charles S. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. edited by Justin Buchler. New York: Dover. Riley, Kathleen C. 2012. “Learning to Exchange Words for Food in the Marquesas.” In Food: Ethnographic Encounters, edited by Leo Coleman, 111–126. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Riley, Kathleen C. and Jillian R. Cavanaugh. 2017. “Tasty Talk, Expressive Food: An Introduction to The Semiotics of Food-and-Language.” Semiotic Review 5. Schieffelin, Bambi B., Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. 1998. Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Schneider, J. G. 2006. “Language and Mediality: On the Medial Status of “Everyday Language.”” Language and Communication 26:331–342. Shankar, Shalini. 2004. “Reel to Real: Desi Teens’ Linguistic Engagements with Bollywood.” Pragmatics 14(2/3):317–336. 2006. “Metaconsumptive Practices and the Circulation of Objectifications.” Journal of Material Culture, 11(3) 293–317. 2008. Desiland: Teen Culture, Class and Success in Silicon Valley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2015. Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2016. “Coming in First: Sound and Embodiment in Spelling Bees.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2):119–140. Shankar, Shalini, and Jillian R. Cavanaugh. 2012. “Language Materiality in Global Capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:355–369. Sherzer, Joel. 1979. “Strategies in Text and Context.” In Language in Use, edited by John Baugh and Joel Sherzer, 145–163. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Silverstein, Michael. 1976. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description.” Meaning in Anthropology 1:1–55. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language and Communication 23(2–3):193–230. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stoller, Paul. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Swigart, Leigh. 2001. “The Limits of Legitimacy: Language Ideology and Shift in Contemporary Senegal.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1):90–130. Urla, Jacqueline. 2012. “Total Quality Language Revival.” In Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, edited by Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller, 73–92. New York: Routledge. Valentine, David. 2003. ““I went to bed with my own kind once”: The Erasure of Desire in the Name of Identity.” Language and Communication 23:128–138. Veblen, T. 1953. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Mentor. Voloshinov, Valentin N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Webster, Anthony. 2009. Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2015. Intimate Grammars: An Ethnography of Navajo Poetry. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Weiner, Annette B. 1984. “From Words to Objects to Magic: “Hard Words” and the Boundaries of Social Interaction.” In Dangerous Words: Language and Politics in

28

Language and Materiality

the Pacific, edited by Don L. Brenneis and Fred Myers, 161–91. New York: New York University Press. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-while-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, Paul. 1977. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press. Wirtz, Kristina. 2014. Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1991. The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigation.” Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Woolard, Kathryn A. 1998. “Introduction: Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, 3–47. New York: Oxford University Press. 1985. “Language Variation and Cultural Hegemony: Toward an Integration of Sociolinguistic and Social Theory.” American Ethnologist 12(4):738–748.

2

Curated Conversation: “Materiality: It’s the Stuff!” Webb Keane and Michael Silverstein

In imaging the types of conversations and scholarship we hoped to cultivate for this volume, one of our goals was to include a range of different genres of texts. Toward this end, in the fall of 2013 we invited Webb Keane and Michael Silverstein to meet with us to engage in a conversation about language, materiality, and semiotics at the 2013 AAA meetings in Chicago. We emailed them three questions in advance of the meetings around which we hoped to structure our conversation (interspersed in the following transcript), and audio recorded and subsequently transcribed our interaction, selecting excerpts that we thought best addressed topics relevant to this volume. Both the complete transcripts and curated versions were shared with the conversation participants for their thoughts and feedback. We have added citations to works and authors discussed in footnotes. The following is the entextualized version of the conversation we had in the morning of November 21, 2013, with Michael Silverstein (MS) and Webb Keane (WK), edited for flow and relevance to this volume. The conversation, which took place in our hotel room, lasted nearly an hour and a half and covered a wide range of topics, including the specific area we had asked them to consider; namely, the relationship of language, materiality, and semiotics. These excerpts primarily feature MS and WK, but occasionally include remarks by the two of us as well (JC–Jillian Cavanaugh and SS–Shalini Shankar).

Why Materiality Now? ms: Materiality has suddenly become the “it” subject. I have several ideas about why materiality now, partly dealing with the history of the fields that are more in the interpretive side of cultural or social investigations. Anthropology went through structuralism and post-structuralism, and there’s power, capillarity, biopolitics, and so on and so forth. But I think that there really is some sense that people have that may not be articulated as an explicit consciousness, but I think that this explains something of this kind of emergence. They are looking for something which is, if you pardon the vernacular, concrete on the one hand and yet symbolic in the sense of something that has meaning attached to it. It’s that kind of place now where people don’t want merely to be talking about the capillarity of power, because it’s empty. [laughter] 29

30

Language and Materiality

wk: To pick up on what you’re saying, there’s both an internal or an immanent genealogy as well as an external one to this. I think there’s kind of a contingent convergence between them. The internal one essentially, as Michael is suggesting, is in some sense the dialectic, if you will. That is to say, when I started graduate school, you had the materialist versus the symbolic. These were the two poles toward which you had to declare allegiance: one or the other. And each was to the exclusion of the other, so each of them essentially reached their own aporia; they became sort of unsustainable as an opposition. One of the things I think, as Michael points out, is those on the symbolic side are in some sense looking for some principled basis for introducing a sense of, let’s say, realism = ms: = Stuff! Stuff! = wk: = Well, what would count as realism is a question to be asked here = ms: = Oh, totally = wk: = But one way to do that was to return to the question of realism, in some sense partly because that battle is over, in its earlier form at least. A generation emerges for which it is no longer threatening to think about materiality. It doesn’t invite you to become Marvin Harris, or doesn’t require you to become a vulgar materialist. But the sense that realism, however, does not turn into reductionism or determinism. ms: That’s the crucial point. wk: There’s also an external side to this as well. One way to think about this, I think, is to realize we’re in an era of this kind of cyber-utopian celebration of the supposedly virtual. And those of us who have any ethnographic sensibility realize that is hooey. Because many of us have lived in places where, for example, there’s no electricity. So suddenly virtuality becomes very much a material problem. Or there’s no cash to pay for access to it, on the one hand. On the other hand this reemergence of this material reductionism in the form of neuroscientific fundamentalism. You get the Steven Pinkers, for example, who have the public ear in the way that Margaret Mead once had. Easy, ready-made answers in advance to any question you want. So out there in the world outside the academy, we have again a kind of materialist reductionism on the one hand and this unsustainable virtualism on the other, which again cries out for a kind of realism that can understand how to bring these into a more interestingly dynamic articulation, which for us however would have to be one which would recognize causality, constraint, consequentiality . . . ms: The very affordances of the material modes and media instruments = wk: = Right, which however do not turn it into determinism or reductionism = ms: = No, no, you see, that’s the interesting place that people are trying to find. Not just in anthropology only, but in many other areas as well. wk: Right, so we’re getting it in STS, but also many historians have picked up on this. ms: Indeed! Oh absolutely! Social history has really, in a big way, moved toward talking about = wk: = and environmental history = ms: = talking about things like the history of furniture, as a kind of lens through which you understand social transformation in a particular kind of place. wk: Or say, you know, the materiality of religion has become very big for medieval historians, for obvious reasons. The Protestant Reformation having been part of the reaction to all that materiality.

Curated Conversation: “Materiality: It’s the Stuff!”

31

ms: I heard an art historian the other year give a whole lecture on whether or not the communion wafer, was, during the medieval period, round or square. [everyone chuckles] wk: There’s a classic rabbinical debate as to whether the mezuzah should be vertical or horizontal. ms: Yes, out of those kinds of debates you get Canberra instead of either Sydney or Melbourne! [laughter] As I said, what I find interesting is to think anthropologically then, as I think we’ve just been doing, about the fact that the focus on this particular subject matter that’s popping up in so many places is itself an index of something that traces a line of an intellectual field that has moved and now really sees the possibility of a reintegration of the cause, power // wk: // Interpretation, concept // ms: // Effect, right, with interpretation, concepts. What’s interesting, too, is that it has emerged in a number of different vernaculars or verbal registers. I mean, those who would do semiotic kind of stuff have never felt alienated from it. [laughter] wk: Well this is the reason why. I mean, part of what’s crucial, maybe this gets us to your second question. ss: // yes beautiful //

What Remains to Be Said about the Relationship between the Semiotic and the Material? wk: One of the things that’s crucial about semiotics is precisely that it offered a principled and rigorous way of making these connections, right from the get go! First of all, I read Peirce very much as a realist. I know there are other ways to read Peirce, but he’s very much a realist in my view. And indexicality is all about establishing, in a rigorous and practicable way, a principle of reality right in the midst of what had seemed to be the most purely conceptual domain, such as linguistic structure. This is what I take to be one of the things that Jakobson was always picking up on, decades ago. One of the things that interests me is how semiotics can form a crucial point of articulation between other academic fields of study. One way we might think of it is the missing but extremely necessary link between, say, the domain of the cognitive on the one hand, and the phenomenology of experience on the other. Because, the thing about semiotics is it requires both dimensions, but also it gives an account of how they work together, which neither the phenomenologists nor, say, anyone interested in cognition has ever, as far as I can tell, even attempted to do. ms: What I’ve always found interesting about situating the semiotic moment of discourse within a field of discourse, is that it’s taken a long time for us to, kind of like, be there, in the sense of people saying, “Oh! This is what it’s all about!” Again, which goes back to an historical circumstance, in a way. That is to say, the very term semiotics got a very bad, bad connotation. wk: It became either bad literary criticism or bad Saussure, decoding and encoding, and this is what it means to many people, or used to. ms: What’s so suggestive is what writers like Peirce can do for renovating precisely the approach to materiality. Because there are tentatives in so much of the literature,

32

Language and Materiality

when you go back to the kind of structuralist moment in French intellectual life. So here’s Roland Barthes, who died in 1981. wk: Run over by a baker’s // ms: // laundry truck // wk: // laundry truck, whatever it was // ms: // he was knocked down and // wk: // while he was crossing the street // ms: // just very unfortunate // jc: // talk about material consequences. ms: But you look at his stuff on material, for example, the fashion system. For example, photography. He starts off always with the cognitive, in the sense of a structure of signs, but then he gets to stuff like the materiality of it, if you will. And suddenly it becomes reproblematized in the most interesting way. And he obviously knew no Peirce because he’s almost into the realm where he says, well, you know, objects are not merely objects, and their functions always are in a system of meaningful approximation to other objects. AH! You mean there’s an indexical field.1 [laughter] wk: There’s an indexical field but what it gets reduced to, if we go back to the first chapter of The Savage Mind, or the second chapter, what you start out with is the material quiddity, the qualities of things and then you reduce them to systems of contrast within a Saussurean template, a Saussurean model2 . So essentially, it’s like Moses on the mountaintop, “I can’t quite get that down to the valley!” So Barthes recognizes the qualities of things, but you see in that historical moment, that could only lead you into phenomenology. ms: Right, because it didn’t, in fact, lead into a kind of dialectical semiotic, you see. So it becomes ultimately a dead end and unfortunately he died, as it were, which was truly a dead end. [laughter] Or Baudrillard, again, really moved from a highly structuralist as well as a kind of Marxist position, but always then making one-line observations, which are in essence about the richness of the semiotic constructivity of all this kind. Furniture, for example, automobiles, this, that, and the other thing.3 One can even go back further and look at someone like McLuhan, who was very influential in his day. I taught quite a few of his books the other year, and they’re, of course, all wacky, in the most extraordinary way. He was really somebody who wanted to épater le bourgeois [shock the middle class] but he never got beyond the notion of a kind of unanalyzable functionality of stuff, of things as instruments.4 wk: Right, right. ms: Everything was an instrument. The prosthesis human // wk: A prosthesis, and therefore, as indeed, at least, some of the minor Latourians ms: // Minor Latourians, I like that [laughs] wk: // In the sense that, to the extent that they are // ms: // You mean like an off-vintage? [laughter] He’s not Château Latour, he’s not the Bordeaux family. He’s Louis Latour, the Burgundy family, so it’s much less prestigious wines. wk: To the extent that you treat material things as extensions, in McLuhan’s sense, or as having agency with which they are endowed by virtue of that kind of extensionality, then to that extent it invites you to dematerialize them once again by finding the ultimate locus, the source of that agency in some kind of will, or some kind of

Curated Conversation: “Materiality: It’s the Stuff!”

33

agentive project which, for which itself there is no material account. So then the next step would be to simply go beyond the phenomenon, as it were. ms: Yes, McLuhan was ultimately a Hegelian in that sense, you see. Each one of these instrumentalities, these prostheses was really a way in which humanity as it were, was advancing in some deep way. wk: So he’s a Hegelian in the sense of history, it is an onward march. ms: Yeah, yeah. But again, all these people in a really interesting way come up against precisely what, for many of us, is the central task of addressing the problem, needless to say, that’s flagged, or denoted by the rubric of “materiality.” In all of its forms, its quiddity. Wonderful word! My teacher Quine used to use it all the time. wk: That’s overdeterministic, Jakobson would be the first to note. ms: What? wk: Quine’s quiddity. ms: Yes, yes, yes absolutely. The quiddity of Quine. wk: It’s the Jakobsonian point being that the materiality of poetics is the materiality of language. ms: You know what’s so tragically ironic in this? In 1942, Roman [Jakobson] gave lectures on phonology at L’École Libre des Hautes Études // wk: // Six lectures on sound and sense // ms: // well, what’s so interesting is, that’s the lectures that Lévi-Strauss first // wk: // Attended the start of but never finished. // ms: // Right. Because the next semester, Lévi-Strauss moved. Roman told me; I asked him: How is it that Lévi-Strauss never really understood that phonology is not the right model? It’s really morphology and syntax, the meaningful parts of language; that is the right model. He said, “Well, he was called off to São Paolo” or something like that. But what’s so ironic, of course, is that Roman called these lectures “Six Leçons sur le Son et le Sens.” wk: // Beautiful, it’s beautiful! // ms: // Exactly. And then you get Lévi-Strauss who wrote a preface to them, or forward rather, to this little book that they became later on and it was translated into English.5 So MIT Press, the people with really poetic sensibility, published this book and it’s called Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Instead of Six Sessions on Sound and Sense! [laughter] “Six Leçons sur le Son et le Sens.” Yes, very ironic. But quiddity, yes, right. So the quiddity, the functionality: what do we mean by functionality, what do we mean by the way in which materiality is in some sense an affordance to social life? What are the cybernetic properties of materiality in relationship to social formations? wk: One reason that I’m now pushing the idea of affordance in my own analysis is // ms: // well you come from Michigan [laughter]. wk: // I don’t come from Michigan, I landed in Michigan. ms: // you know, Ford, and General Motors, materiality. [laughter] wk: // You know some forms of materiality were meant to be left behind [laughter]. What I like about the concept of affordance is that it accepts a certain degree of objectivity of the material world on the one hand. On the other hand, it keeps alive that quality that I take to be crucial to the anthropological project of the undetermined character of human projects. Such that // ms: // Sometimes perversely so. //

34

Language and Materiality

wk: // Yes, such that, it’s a way of putting human projects and human imagination, if you will, back into the world of causes and effects, of consequences, of origins, of constraints, of possibilities. A world of objective material circumstances as, as they used to call it back in the barricades in ’68, that is nonetheless, not deterministic, because the point of affordance is that an affordance is only a possibility that may or may not be taken up. It’s a real possibility, but whether it’s taken up is not itself determined in any useful or meaningful sense of the term. And it’s crucial to retain that because in some sense it is at the heart of the entire anthropological project. Whether follow a genealogy that runs through Durkheim or through Weber or through Boas. What I take them all to have in common is that insistence on the relative freedom of human projects, that are nonetheless within a world that is knowable in a realist sense. ms: There’s work to be done in clarifying the concept of affordance because the three saints whom you mention, I think each of them had a very clear sense that the opposition was not, as so many people immediately presume, between the individual as an agentive, creative, imaginative, Kantian kind of person, as it were, and nothing. That there’s an intermediate notion, which always involves modalities of collectivity, and therefore normativity within which you see even affordances are kind of indirect, in that sense. I was thinking, as we were talking, of Shalini’s folks with their car fetishism in California. They do comparative gadgetry, it’s very important conceptually, but it creates stratification as a group phenomenon.6 wk: First of all, one of the conditions of possibility for that sociality is the materiality of those phenomena through which people manifest their projects, or the affordances that they take up in the pursuing of their projects, which themselves in part by virtue of their shared materiality exist within a public world, that is to say, they are available to others. ms: Like Jillian’s folks who operate within a world of commodities, in fact, the intersection of consumables and commodities, to a tremendous extent, whose position within hierarchies of prestige via localization becomes the real project.7 wk: Right, right, right. In some sense, it becomes the origin of the projects itself. ms: Precisely. wk: It’s not individual projects that then become social, but the individual projects themselves emerge out of sociality, a condition, not the only, but one condition of the possibility for which is the availability of people to one another by virtue of these material/semiotic mediations. But they exist as semiotic mediations in part because they are material. They’re not otherwise because people, as I’ve said elsewhere, are not mind readers. The developmental psychologists have this notion of mind reading but it’s mind reading that is always mediated materially. ms: It’s difficult to get them to understand that. Needless to say. I mean you can show people a conversation, you can show that in fact it’s the poetics of the conversation which is constraining people to say what they say, as it were. wk: And this is poetics in the Jakobsonian sense, it is by virtue of the material, and this gets to your last question, by virtue of the material forms of language // ms: How do you know these questions already? Are you a mind reader? ss: I think he is engaging with the materiality that we sent. ms: Oh, look at that. How extraordinary. No wonder you’re so fluent! [laughter] ms: To clarify the second question, the nature of quiddity, affordances, functionality, the cause and effect, and most interesting I found very good in your citing of Boas,

Curated Conversation: “Materiality: It’s the Stuff!”

35

Weber, and Durkheim, the mediating nature of the collective, that in fact the collective becomes in a curious way, via semiosis, itself a deutero-affordance. wk: Absolutely! ms: And that’s absolutely central it seems to me, certainly one anthropologists would be very concerned with. You’ve both written about the kind of metalanguage of materiality, as it were, which is absolutely central to materiality itself, in the modalities in which you are interested in them. If we thought longer it seems to me, we would probably come up with in fact more dimensions of what’s necessary to probe about materiality. Although probably your bouquet of empirical contributions will reveal some of this. wk: I’ll toss one thing in there, which is that what remains to be done in this line is in part I think a clearer sense of what the stakes are in this move, why it matters. Thinking of my own project, one of the ways in which I think it matters is that it offers us a new way to rethink the old fact/value distinction, this foundational distinction, the ground on which the distinction of the human sciences, from the natural sciences on the one hand and the humanities on the other, is its focus on this relationship between fact and value, and this founding distinction between them that certainly Weber sets up at the beginning of Economy and Society, for example. That a social science is properly concerned not with floods and demographic booms but with events that are the outcome of intentional projects of self-aware humans. ms: And Uncle Émile [Durkheim], by contrast, who obviously had science envy, had to establish that collective facts are facts! There you go. // wk: // But they are social facts by virtue of their saturation with value. ms: It was a framework within which statistical aggregation could become factual. wk: What’s interesting about the suicide book is, behind the statistical aggregation he finds a world of value.8 // ms: // Indeed, indeed, that is the point, yes. // wk: // That is to say the statistical distributions of suicide are ultimately explainable by reference to something on the other side of this fact/value distinction. ms: And not just the vernacular fact/value distinction, but Durkheim was very concerned // wk: // with the facticity of value // ms: // Absolutely! The facticity of value. Hence, the very scientific quality of sociology was at stake. wk: But again, this is why I think it is crucial that we understand clearly the location of semiotics as the necessary mediation between any number of alternatives. But the one that’s on my mind at the moment is, say, between cognitive science and, and beyond that, behind that, say the neurophysiological stuff // ms: // materiality, shall we say? [laughter] wk: // I mean, in its most deterministic, reductionist sense. On the one hand a kind of phenomenology that goes off into pure subjectivity, on the other hand, that semiotics is a crucial mediating point there. Which is also an opening to ways of rethinking the place of value within people’s material worlds. In part because of that lack of determinism, that sense that human projects driven by senses of hierarchies of value are irreducible to prior determinants. ms: But here again, you see, you have all of these attempts ultimately to derive values and explain them away on the basis of facts. Including your late colleague, Rappaport, whose book on religion is one of the most massively misguided //

36

Language and Materiality

wk: // But there are much more massively misguided ones, Steven Pinker, I mentioned. Sam Harris is another one. ms: Who? wk: There’s a guy named Sam Harris who is a neuroscientist. ms: Oh dear. wk: Who takes the credentials of having been an undergraduate philosophy major. He’s one of the four horsemen of the atheistic apocalypse: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, etc. Take James [Q. Wilson], whose book, called The Moral Sense, is the most bald-faced positivistic account.9 So, morality is a concept we need to do without because everything is ultimately explicable in terms of the physical causality at the level of neuroscience. This stuff is ludicrous and it seems incredibly silly. However, it has captured the public imagination. ms: The public wants it! So, you have to understand that like prostitution, there is a market! // wk: // There’s a market for it! // ms: And you have cheerleaders, for example, at the New York Times, Nicholas Wade, who is an uninformed cheerleader. wk: Who is the most appalling positivist. ms: And for no reason! There’s nothing to show for it. wk: If we treat semiotics as a freestanding isolate, discipline, independent of all others, in splendid isolation, we can’t get the full impact of the implications that we would have if we were to give a clear account of its necessity – not just as semiotic mediation but as a mediation between these different modes of understanding the world, such as the cognitive and the phenomenological. ms: Which of course have been two branches, in a sense, of a kind of directly psychological notion of materiality – that is to say, percepts – so here we get the color terms, and the cognition of hue saturation and brightness as a psychophysical phenomenon, that plugs directly into and explains – let it be said I’m using air quotes–// [laughter] wk: // Let it be noted on the record that scare quotes were employed! [laughter] ms: That “explains” the symbolisms of color. Again here, not understanding quite that at best what it does is give you an affordance for the symbolism of color! wk: Exactly, exactly, for which an account of human projects . . . ms: There you go. wk: Let me say, the cognition and phenomenology opposition that I introduced here is missing a critical dimension, which Michael mentioned earlier, which is of course the social-political. And so we would have to see it as a dialectic with more than two parts! ms: Oh yes. wk: Because the other thing of course, as Michael himself has spent decades showing us, is that indexicality is crucial for understanding the full articulation of sociopolitical circumstance, in the world as people actually understand it, take themselves to understand it. ms: I was going [to] say though, if you think about it from the notion of the psychologies of materiality, so on the one hand you have the cognitive stuff that [is] exemplified brilliantly by the color literature, where a domain of properties can be ultimately reduced all the way to physics really, because it’s electromagnetic waves after all, which we don’t want to deny the existence of, certainly.

Curated Conversation: “Materiality: It’s the Stuff!”

37

wk: Right. ms: But then on the other hand the phenomenological one is a very interesting alternative kind of psychology in a way, which, on the one hand is gooier than the perceptual and conceptual psychology literature, because it ties directly and unmediatedly to subjectivity. wk: Yes. ms: See that’s what’s so interesting! So as you were just pointing out, subjectivity now, the post-Foucauldians are quite acutely aware that subjectivity is in fact an emergent property within a large sociopolitical order, as you were saying. And only exists within a large sociopolitical order. But the phenomenologists have their own approach to the psychology of subjectivity in a curious way that, again, completely evacuates the whole field of the sociopolitical order. It’s been a besetting evil of much of ethnomethodology even, closer to home in terms of the analysis of interaction. Very curious. wk: Part of the answer to the question, “what is semiotics good for that couldn’t be done by some other approach?” and one answer to that is it provides a robust and potentially rigorous account of how you get from subjectivities to the sociopolitical and back again. ms: yes, ontologically speaking, they’re a function of each other. You can’t avoid it. Every time people start talking to me about the Dasein of the organism as the materiality, if you will, from which subjectivity emerges, you know. wk: Does this happen often? [laughter] ms: Well, it depends on whether you hang around with philosophers. One begins to wonder well, “Hmmm, does this happen if you’re in a white room, or a black box, or whatever? Or, what is it in fact stimulated by?” And then of course immediately the social comes pouring in. Nevertheless, it is also like the other kind of psychologically driven approach, a way of trying to get the social reality from the bottom up in some way. The materiality then becomes the kind of first-order stuff in some way. Rather than something which is always both presumed upon and emergent, like qualia. wk: /Right, so again we want to think this is a really fully dialectical relationship in so far as it’s working both ways. ms: Yes. wk: It’s not simply that things are emerging into the social or the social is saturating some other domain, but that both are going on. ms: Yes. It makes things much more complicated, to address, to probe, to try to understand. But it seems to me that’s a very good message that one could get out by this kind of a project that you’re undertaking. wk: That there’s a payoff. The important point is to say, it’s not just materiality’s like, “oh good it’s a new thing!” Or we needed a new thing, but rather that there’s a payoff. There’s something at stake there.

Scholars Who Focus on Materiality Have Questioned the Value of the Linguistic Turn – Can Linguistic Anthropology Make Peace with Such Viewpoints? Does It Want To? ms: Yes, that gets now to the third question! What does this kind of perspective bring, not merely to materiality but what can it show? What can it show that this kind of

38

Language and Materiality

anxiety or worry on the part of many different colleagues in multiple fields can in fact be clarified in certain interesting ways, right? wk: Right. So it seems to me that two points about language and materiality point to different directions in this relationship or this dialectic. One is, as Jakobson made clear half a century ago, that language is itself an object of experience, that poetics only exist by virtue of people’s response to the actual sensual experience of language. So, that language is not something you go through to get to something else, whether that be structures of the mind or that be propositional content, but that it also has palpable qualities in its own right, which are not, as it were, immaterial. ms: Textual qualities. wk: Textual qualities. So, that’s the first point, that I think is abundantly clear. The second is the role that language plays in the processes of typification or objectification, not in the materialization sense of the word objectification, but in the conceptualization. That is to say the role that language plays in the ongoing production of awareness and particularly, I think of interest to us, of sociological awareness or sociopolitical awareness. Of which the old notion of typification that Alfred Schutz developed in the 1930s and onward, is very usefully elaborated as a semiotic process, one in which language is a crucial factor. You can’t have a full-fledged Schutzian typification without language. ms: I’m very encouraged, for example, by moves within analytic philosophy toward a more open and semiotic conceptualization, even of meaning in the denotational sense. Richard Rorty was moving very definitively in such a direction. Certainly Hilary Putnam. wk: And more recently, there’s this guy, for example, David Velleman, at NYU. ms: Robert Brandom at Pittsburgh, François Recanati in Paris, and so forth. They’re discovering indexicality, in short, we would say, “OK, fine, welcome! You’re discovering indexicality.” Probing this without analytic vocabulary for it, but nevertheless, probing precisely how conceptual meanings flow through our use of language. What’s interesting, of course, is that indeed, it comes back precisely to poetics, to the contextualization of language in particular kind of social projects that are frequently microcontextually realizable but they’re also macrosociologically realizable projects, like for example, I work on wine terminology and discourse and class stratification, and projects of that sort.10 wk: Any of these sort of classic projects, like the analysis of ideology or hegemony, which really can’t get anywhere without a full-fledged semiotic understanding of their languages. ms: Right, the discourses that in fact both are the articulation of these kinds of orientations like ideological orientations and so forth. What I find very interesting is that you mentioned Schutz in the 1930s and typification and so forth; parallel to that but totally independent of it, of course was, as I read Whorf – Whorf’s questioning ultimately of materiality itself. In his last phase he became a theosophist. What’s so interesting about Whorf, is that Whorf really became obsessed with the question of materiality. And it was quite clear he was pissed off by Bloomfield, who as a linguist was completely in the intellectual thrall of the Vienna circle, that kind of space-time positivism. And that’s why Whorf wrote about space and time! And showed that space and time themselves are materialities, which are conceptually emergent out of this kind of dialectic. So that language has concepts of all kinds in it, but to demonstrate that there are exactly these kinds of concepts in language itself, you see, and that language is central, in a dialectical sense,

Curated Conversation: “Materiality: It’s the Stuff!”

39

engaged with materiality as it is projected in and through language with materiality itself.11 wk: But not in the sense in which it is often taken as merely the expression of this kind of Promethean human. ms: Oh, God. wk: /This is why semiotics has to be understood as a realist project because it is not // ms: // I see what you mean // wk: // Pure constructionism, which is the most conventional reading of it. ms: God isn’t that awful. Yes, does thought influence language or does language influence thought? [laughter] wk: Either way you answer that, it could turn out that there’s nothing outside, as it were, there’s nothing pushing back. ms: // Yes, that’s the misreading of mostly literary theorists, thinking of here of Jonathan Culler, my college classmate, or of Fred Jameson, each from their own points of view, or a Riffatère even, who went after Jakobson with a kind of ignorance of the Praguean project, just really frightful. But what I’m saying is that what Whorf was really onto was the project of materiality! And the relationship of language to materiality. Clock-time, as it were. Confused for tense. Tense reflexively understood through clock and calendar time, because those are the social practices of metricalization and metricization, in the Latourian sense, by which we understand the experience of duration and intervality. Here’s the most quiddious of quiddities, as it were, right? When we say Dasein, it’s place and time, the placedness of the evenemential envelope of the organism. What Whorf is saying is that these things in fact are inflected rather differently as materialities. It’s a very difficult point to get across to people, I’ve found, in forty years of teaching. [laughter] wk: You can’t stop with Whorf; it requires further elaboration. ms: Yes, it requires recuperating Whorf through a reading that is more frankly semiotic. No, you’re absolutely right, and that’s a very, very important point, it seems to me, that one can only read what Whorf was up to with some actual historical understanding of what he was up to. If you have some kind of semiotic framework within which you can reinterpret this. wk: And a certain degree of charity, I think we might add // ms: // You mean for his wackiness? // wk: // Yeah, charity, yeah // ms: // Well, to be sure. But look, that’s the same thing with Roman. Roman never put two and two together, as I try telling students all the time. On the one hand, he had his poetics, his famous paper on linguistics and poetics; on the other hand, in the mid-50s, he discovered the fallen Harvard angel, Peirce. He was a cokehead and went off to Paris to marry an “actress.” The establishment types hounded him for his entire life, and prevented him from having a position anywhere. So even Roman, he never put the two together. It’s something that one can only do retrospectively, through a recuperative reading. In any case, Whorf is an interesting character in that particular way, precisely because he not only talks about the sociohistorical specificity both in a diachronic and in a collective social sense of what seems to us to be the most fundamental individual conceptualization of our subjectivity of time, for example. But actually works on something which is very central to what anyone I think would call materiality! [laughter] Right? Yes. Have we reached a conclusion?

40

Language and Materiality

wk: // So, so as the guy in the John Gumperz essay says, “Would that be enough?” Would that be enough introduction? [laughter] jc: Yes, that’s great, thank you so much. Any last words? wk: // Oh I hope not // [laughter] ms: Yes, that’s right. Concluding words, you mean, rather than final. [laughter] Materiality: it’s the stuff! N OT E S 1 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983) and Elements of Semiology (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977). 2 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 3 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996). 4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). 5 Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978). 6 Shalini Shankar, 2006, “Metaconsumptive Practices and the Circulation of Objectifications,” Journal of Material Culture 11(3):293–317. 7 Jillian R. Cavanaugh, 2007, “Making Salami, Producing Bergamo: The Transformation of Value,” Ethnos 72(2):149–172. 8 Émile Durkheim, Suicide, (reissued ed. New York: Free Press, 1977). 9 James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993). 10 Michael Silverstein. 2006, “Old Wine, New Ethnographic Lexicography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 481–496, and “Semiotic Vindication and the Scaling of Taste.” In Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life, edited by E. Summerson Carr & Michael Lempert, 185–212 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016). 11 Benjamin Lee Whorf “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language.” In Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by John B. Carroll, 134–159 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1941]1956), See also “Language, Mind, and Reality,” pp. 246–270.

Part I

Texts, Objects, Mediality

3

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year: Commodified Language Forms in Multiple Contexts∗ Laura Miller

Introduction In 2011, authorities in Tokyo issued a series of confusing statements about attempts to cool the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The day after the earthquake and tsunami hit, Madarame Haruki, head of the Nuclear Safety Commission for the Cabinet Office, suggested the possibility that injection of seawater might result in “recriticality,” the term for a recurrence of nuclear fission reactions. On May 22, however, the government issued a correction, stating that what Madarame had actually meant was this: “The possibility of recriticality is not zero” (Sairinkai no kan¯osei zero de wa nai). This infamous backpedaling infuriated the Japanese public, who latched onto “the possibility is not zero” as a meme du jour and an incriminating catchphrase. I have been finding many instances in which an individual’s words or expressions such as “the possibility is not zero” have become objectified and commodified in Japanese public spaces. My approach to language materiality is to track how some Japanese words and kanji (borrowed Chinese logographic characters used in the Japanese writing system) are fetishized and objectified first through contests, and then in media practices that promote and celebrate these contests and their winners. I use the concept of language objectification the way it is described by Shankar and Cavanaugh (2012: 355), in which “non objects are given object-like qualities, involving the externalization and materialization of meaning and value.” I conceptualize these forms as examples of materiality because of the manner in which they are first objectified and then, often, commodified as word-things (see also Thurlow and Jaworski, Chapter 10, this volume) that appear in news programs, are written or printed on objects, and are spread through social media and in new contexts. ∗

This chapter is based on a paper presented at the 2012 American Anthropological Association, in San Francisco. I received much helpful feedback from Levi McLaughlin and Jan Bardsley and greatly appreciate their comments. A version was also presented at the Midwest Japan Seminar in 2013, and members of the group, especially Noboru Tomonari, David Plath and Noriko Akimoto Sugimoto offered constructive ideas.

43

44

Language and Materiality

“The possibility is not zero” joined other expressions from Japanese politics, sports, entertainment, and subcultural hipsterdom in published annual lists of competing entries in a national buzzword contest. This highly promoted contest, the U-Can New and Trendy Word Grand Prix (U-Can shingo, ry¯uk¯ogo taish¯o, sponsored by Jiyu Kokuminsha) is eagerly awaited and its entries published in national newspapers, where the trendy words are admired by millions of speakers and writers and then recontextualized into novel domains. Another annual contest named Kanji of the Year (Chinese Character of the Year, or Kotoshi no kanji) receives massive media promotion as well. Entries from these contests are selected by publishing companies and an educational service firm with input from public surveys and polls, after which the terms and kanji become objects that denote Japanese cleverness, coolness, and weirdness. Cute or witty sayings from favorite TV programs, failed circumventions from politicians, and witty quips from celebrities change from being part of someone’s verbal or graphic performance into objectified things and commodities that circulate in multiple new contexts.1 As a result of this language-materialization process, young girls post YouTube enactments of gay male celebrities’ linguistic gimmicks, and countless Lolcat photos with the winning buzzwords are created. These cat photos depict the animals with disdainful expressions. The arrogant kitties are usually just staring at the camera, although a few show them staring at the photographer amidst ruined houseplants or heaps of shredded paper. In this chapter I look at the background of each contest, as well as the forms of objectification and commodification of words and characters that provide them with new lives through the contests. I use the term “commodification” to mean a process by and through which trendy words and Chinese characters that were previously unsellable have become sellable, following the path of other scholars who use it in such a manner (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012; Duchêne and Heller 2013). In a critique of this way of using the term “commodification,” in which there is considerable slippage from a strict Marxist interpretation, Block (in press) argues that it is not an appropriate construct for language researchers. For scholars who are not meticulous Marxists, however, the concept of commodification serves well as a useful metaphor when it is used to draw attention to how forms or parts of language are materialized. Words or kanji characters from the contests also travel outside Japan, where they are translated and presented in BBC news, debated by linguists and language junkies on blogs, and offered by American undergraduates as a form of cultural capital for knowing the latest Japanese slang. I look at some of these commodified language forms, exploring the ways in which mass-mediated attention provides often odd and transitory expressions with new meanings and uses that allow multiple border crossings. Deentextualized and then recontextualized into new domains, they transform from spoken events or text into objects deployed in YouTube clips, photographs, t-shirts, and coffee mugs. They take on a type of language materiality, to use the term offered by Shankar and

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

45

Cavanaugh (2012). As they note, “linguistic forms may acquire material qualities when they are pressed into new modes of objectification, circulation, and recontextualization” (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012: 356). These Japanese language commodities became things apart from the speakers and writers who produced them. The Word Grand Prix How did certain words and expressions become such hot commodities in Japan? Japanese readers and audiences have always appreciated language as an artistic product, and there is a long history of books, TV programs, and other media that specialize in deconstructing innovative language.2 A number of new commercial magazines were published during the 1990s, intended for a general readership, that analyzed “CM,” the Japanese acronym for advertising copy based on the English “commercial message.” A few of these periodicals were CM Entertainment Magazine, CM Now, Favorite CM Characters, Consumer Mind Index, and Up to Creation Brain. A publishing industry that specializes in analysis of the language of commercials is only one example of a widespread awareness and appreciation for creative language use found in Japan. The popularity of word contests is therefore not at all surprising. The New and Trendy Word Grand Prix has its origin in a publishing firm’s desire to entice people to buy its encyclopedia of loanwords and neologisms. In October 1948 a collection of words relating to postwar Japanese politics, sports, and modern life was published as a monthly report by a company named Jiyu Kokuminsha. Titled Fundamental Knowledge of Contemporary Words (Gendai y¯ogo no kiso chishiki), it was a mere 192 pages long. It included many loanwords and terms from the postwar political realm. For example, it listed “depurge” (dep¯aju), a word borrowed from the American occupation to mean the rehabilitation of journalists, movie producers, and labor organizations authorized to reenter civilian life. Over the next decades Jiyu Kokuminsha continued to publish the annual compilation, which became larger and more admired as the years went on. One recent collection is 1,600 pages long and includes a thirty-year retrospective on the contest (Gendai Y¯ogo no Kiso Chishiki Hensh¯ubu 2014). There is also a New Words and Trendy Words Card Game, illustrated by Shimotani Nisuke (2006). In 1984 Jiyu Kokuminsha created a word contest based on its published collection and invited the public to vote in the inaugural Trendy Word Grand Prix (Ry¯uk¯ogo Taish¯o). Until 1994 there were actually two prize categories, new words and buzzwords, but these were later combined into one list. Jiyu Kokuminsha teamed up with another sponsoring company named U-Can (Yu Kyan) in 2003. U-Can, formerly named the Education Alliance Japan Communications Company, is a commercial provider of correspondence courses and educational materials. After the merger the contest was renamed the U-Can

46

Language and Materiality

New and Trendy Word Grand Prix (U-Can shingo, ry¯uk¯ogo taish¯o). The selection works through a series of vetting operations. The general public submits candidates by filling out a questionnaire. From these entries, Jiyu Kokuminsha complies a list of sixty words or expressions and presents them to a jury of seven people who determine the top ten. This panel is made up of writers, celebrities, and academics. For example, the 2011 jury included Mitsuru Yaku (comic artist), Yanai Michihiko (advertising industry art director and cinematographer), Kang Sang-jung (University of Tokyo professor of political science), Torigoe Shuntar¯o (journalist, essayist, and TV commentator), Tawara Machi (poet, writer, and translator), Muroi Shigeru (actress and essayist), and the longtime editor of Fundamental Knowledge of Contemporary Words, Shimizu Hitoshi. The winners are announced in early December every year with great fanfare, followed by an awards ceremony that is covered by print and TV news outlets. At the awards ceremony, the winning words or expressions are presented by the hosts to people or companies that are the putative creators in those cases where there are identifiable language innovators and they are willing to appear. Although the general public has some involvement in the selection process, this does not mean that anything goes or that some words are not screened or censored from the ultimate list. There have been some controversial candidates. Jiyu Kokuminsha tries to limit the winners to positive or upbeat expressions. For example, in 1995 the domestic Japanese terrorist religious group Aum Shinriky¯o used the term poa to justify their sarin gas attacks. It is a word derived from the Tibetan Buddhist term “phowa,” which refers to a religious intervention that would funnel someone toward a positive rebirth, an idea refashioned by the leader of Aum Shinriky¯o (imprisoned criminal mastermind, Asahara Sh¯ok¯o) as a justification for murder (Shimazono 1997: 61–68; Reader 2000: 149–151). McLaughlin (2012: 65–66) traces how Aum Shinriky¯o first intended to carry out poa on Ikeda Daisaku, the head of a lay religious organization: “Asahara sought to reverse Ikeda’s karma by performing poa upon him through a preemptive assassination.” The word flooded broadcast media and was also used in novel coinages and appeared at the top in the public poll of trendy words. During the late 1990s, anything in the media remotely related to Aum Shinriky¯o was bound to provoke a controversial response (see, for example, Hardacre 2007), so the term poa was deemed too inflammatory for the contest. Although it was purged from the contest, the term poa remains as a potent material sign that denotes either the religious movement or its founder, Asahara. Among its continuing material life are thousands of internet memes featuring his face together with the word. Nevertheless, some contentious expressions do make it onto the list. In 2007 the head of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, Yanagisawa Hakuo, made a public statement about the dire demographic trends faced by Japan.

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

47

He addressed the issue of Japan’s declining birthrate by stating, “The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed. Because the number of childbearing machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head” (McCurry 2007). Labeling women as “child-bearing machines” (umu kikai) did not go unnoticed and caused much uproar and many protests.3 Some feminists appropriated the expression for t-shirts and signs that mocked its original use. By making the offensive description into comic material, they drew attention to the misogyny it reflected. Even so, Jiyu Kokuminsha decided not to eliminate the term from its list of trendy words. Evidently, offending women is less risky than courting disfavor with other groups. The words or expressions selected in 2011 represented concepts from a range of domains. Number 5 on the list of champions was doyagao, a regional dialect expression about a smug or cocky facial expression. It comes from the Kansai area idiom doya, which can mean something like “How do you like it,” “What of it?” or “What the fuck?” to describe a person’s self-satisfied face. Thereafter the description doyagao took off and began appearing as an annotation scrawled on a type of self-photography (sticker photos called purikura), t-shirts, and other contexts. When I google doyagao I also find hundreds of photos of cats with smug expressions and the word doyagao written on them. Several prominent public figures were singled out as masters of doyagao. For example, celebrity chef Kawagoe Tatsuya is often said to have a particularly stuck-up doyagao face. In 2011, TV Asahi premiered a new talk variety program titled Oh! Doyagao Summit; it was broadcast on TV until 2013 by the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation. The format of the program was to have celebrities tell amusing stories about themselves in which the punchline is their doyagao face. Another entry on the 2011 list (Number 10) was the expression “love injection” (rabu ch¯uny¯u). It is part of a complex routine created and performed by the comedian and actor, Tanoshingo (real name Sat¯o Shingo), who has joined a growing number of popular gay entertainers called onei-kei tarento, “older sister celebrity.” Tanoshingo’s flamboyant speech style was adumbrated by a famous transgender personality named IKKO, who made a splash with a favored expression, dondake (a Kansai regionalism meaning “Huh? What the?”), which was nominated for the Trendy Word Grand Prix in 2007.4 Tanoshingo created a campy combination of dance and expression that became a viral sensation. He starts the bit by placing his right hand under his left armpit, followed by a vigorous shimmy and twirl. His twirl ends with both hands formed into a heart shape that is thrust forward while saying rabu ch¯uny¯u, “love injection.” Soon the expression appeared in Ascii art and was printed on a line of Tanoshingo goods, including toilet paper, stationary, and a cell phone strap. The routine penetrated into the precincts of Akihabara Maid Cafés, where the young women dressed in frilly maid costumes performed it after presenting customers with decorated coffee and omelets. Everyone emulated his

48

Language and Materiality

performance, including office workers and groups of matrons. Parents posted hundreds of YouTube videos of their darling offspring doing the squiggly move and heart shape routine. “Love injection” became so objectified it was given its own emoticon in girls’ text messages: ♪ (ðˆ࢟ˆ )ð ࢵLOVE ⋆ . The contest judges for Jiyu Kokuminsha adjudicate the great flood of new and unusual terms and harvest these linguistic offerings not only with an eye toward novelty but also to establish their own refined linguistic sensibilities. As interested parties, they do not allow a bottleneck of particular types of words, appearing to decide on a balance of terms from sports, entertainment, and politics. If one compares the winners of the Word Grand Prix from 1984 to the ones that rose to the top after 2000, a calculated weighing of entries from the various domains is apparent. There are always a few words that highlight the geinokai or entertainment industry, a few from sports, a few from politics, and a few that address women’s issues and gender roles. By selecting words from a range of different constituencies the contest judges aim to be inclusive and not to intentionally exclude any quarter. When lifted from their verbal or textual locations, the champion Word Grand Prix entries become something different: they become objectified, thing-like entities that circulate in new domains, taking on a materiality that is different from their original private and public appearances. The words are taken out of the realm of speech and out of the realm of abstract language, and they become discrete items in books, lists, and on tote bags. The words are a good instance of language materiality because they have acquired “thinginess” (Silverstein 1996: 290–291). Now in the spotlight, they transform into language superstars that highlight cultural moments of mass interest. These bits of language are not simply faddish linguistic specimens because they also function as the vehicles for career advancement, political criticism, celebration of sports achievements, or commemoration of disasters. Although originating in verbal performances, the Word Grand Prix winners eventually transition into “anti-verbal art.” If verbal art is defined as creative speech play and verbal artistry (Sherzer 2002), the trendy words unavoidably become calcified and static, rolled out in almost predictable circumstances. They become trite and occasionally tokenistic, yet those traits are secondary to their real worth. The expressions and words are first given materiality when they are placed onto the Grand Prix list, where they are pitted against other entries. Over time the lapidary effort that went into crafting these ditties is lost. These prefab expressions are ironically delivered or promoted as if they are novel products of individual or Japanese cultural genius. Many of the language entrepreneurs are entertainers who take risks in creating these forms and using them as taglines or identifying gimmicks. They rely on novel sayings or reframed expressions

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

49

to get noticed and to get a place on the most watched TV programs. Any “linguistic whitewashing” (using language to lend a degree of pious gravity that may enhance public image-making)5 is forgiven or pushed aside by the public and the language connoisseurs, suggesting that the words or expressions themselves are not the only crux of the matter. Linguistic whitewashing occurs when planned words and expressions that are not off-the-cuff innovations but rather deliberately crafted slogans are delivered as if they are novel occurrences. The linguistic awareness used in the adjudication process is equally critical. Both judges and language innovators stake their money, careers, and reputations on their choices. During the period after the announcement of contest winners, judges and the reputed creators of the words are interviewed on TV and in print media, which in turn provides a nice career boost. Kamei Hajime is a self-styled neologism analyst (shingo anarisuto) who speaks and writes about slang and buzzwords on TV, radio, and in print media. He was hired by Jiyu Kokuminsha’s editorial department in 1969 and worked for them until 1988. In an essay he contributed to a special magazine issue (Kamei 2011), he theorizes the “five rules” for nominating winning words for Jiyu Kokuminsha’s contest, providing patterned word-formation structures and examples for each category. In other words, he provides a handy template for how to go about objectifying and commodifying words. Rule 1: Pick nicknames. According to Kamei, anything with the address suffixes -oji (prince), -sama (the honorific form of san, Ms/Mrs/Mr), and -tench¯o (shop manager) are good bets. Kamei provides us with Hankachi o¯ ji (Handkerchief Prince), the moniker for Sait¯o Y¯uki, a baseball player (pitcher) who uses a handkerchief to wipe sweat off during the game. There was also Yonsama (Honorable Yon) the nickname for Korean actor Bae Yong- joon, a name that he reportedly detested. Kodomo-tench¯o (Child Shop Manager) was derived from a Toyota TV ad that featured child actor Kato Seishiro playing a Tokyo car dealership manager who explains the pricing system. Rule 2: Pick names or descriptors for groups. Kamei notices that many of these words are terms used to refer to categories of young women. For example, new words for female types may be coined by using different affixes such as -jo (woman, girl), -joshi (woman), -g¯aru, and –gyaru ( two versions of the English loanword “girl”) He gives the examples of yama-g¯aru (mountain girl), used for female mountain trekkers, and nikushoku-kei joshi (meat-eating women) for carnivorous, aggressive women who hunt men. There were so-called reki-jo (reki is clipped from rekishi, history), “history girls” who eagerly visited historic sites and became avid consumers of feudal-era related goods and media. Rule 3: Pick words that leave a strong impression. It does not take someone with Kamei’s expertise to notice that, for example, the term hinkaku (dignity) became popular in numerous book and media titles. It started with the smarmy Kokka no hinkaku (The Dignity of the Nation, Fujiwara 2005), and

50

Language and Materiality

led to other bestsellers and hits such as Josei no hinkaku (The Dignity of the Woman, Bando 2006) and the hit TV series Haken no hinkaku (The Dignity of The Temp, Nagumo 2007).6 Rule 4: Pick terms for generational groups and social trends. This category yields many examples, according to Kamei. He notes Hanako jidai (the Hanako era), used to refer to the single, middle-class young women of the late 1980s who were the original readership for the magazine Hanako. A more recent term he lists is muen shakai (alienated society), for the increasing erosion of social ties and relationships. Rule 5: Use jargon from business specialties. Kamei sees many hot words entering the wider social linguistic landscape from medicine, technology, the financial industry, and other specialized sectors. He offers metabo for “metabolic syndrome,” an obesity disorder, and gerira g¯ou (guerrilla rainstorm) for extremely heavy, localized rain that is of short duration. As a former insider Kamei knows a lot about this objectification and commodification process. However, there are many winning entrants that do not fit his categories. He also outlines some of the linguistic patterns used in Japanese word formation, providing a few examples from past Jiyu Kokuminsha winners. While interesting, his approach yields little insight into the domains or realms from which these words are selected and how they move from being words to objects. Yet his essay does point us to the underlying thinking about words that enables their easy path to objectification. Kamei believes that the power and value of these words emanate from their structure and freshness, their kotodama (word soul). This term is entrenched in Japanese thought and literary criticism, and it often reflects a discourse of Japanese uniqueness and self-exoticization. It is the idea that words contain a preexisting ineffable power, a notion that provides words with an inherent materiality. At the same time, his thinking mirrors an ideology that linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill (2008) terms “referential ideology,” which entails a focus on the “meaning” of words, as if meaning can only be found residing in the words themselves. Contrary to this, language scholars have found that meaning also works through indexicality, the spaces where meaning is negotiated, and that inferences are made in a context, through co-constructed meaning. When we look at many of the winning Jiyu Kokuminsha selections, they are not particularly elegant or beautiful bits of language that have any inherent oomph or appeal. The winner for 2012, for example, was a hybrid English-Japanese catchphrase used by a wacky comedian named Sugiyama Eiji, who goes by the nickname Sugi-chan. He used the English loanword “wild” in a pet phrase, “wairudo dar¯o?” (That’s wild, right?) to refer to his own supposedly outrageous antics. The words themselves have no obvious energy, and it was only after TV viewers witnessed Sugi-chan objectifying them through repeated performance that they became fodder for mimicry and repetition by others. Thereafter it transformed into a formulaic phrase when it was selected as the top buzzword for the year. This layering of

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

51

indexicality is where power and commoditization reside, and not in the morphemes alone.

Kanji of the Year as Spectacle and National Mood Another language contest is Kanji of the Year (Kotoshi no kanji). Unlike the Word Grand Prix winners, the triumphant kanji already enter the arena in material forms. Yet the process by which they are objectified and commodified is similar. The contest began in 1995 and is entirely based on public votes with no other vetting. It is hosted by the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society (Zaidan H¯ojin Nihon Kanji N¯oryoku Kentei Ky¯okai). This group publishes reference works and administers the nationwide Japan Kanji Proficiency Test (Nihon Kanji N¯oryoku Kentei Shiken), also known as Kanji Kentei or Kanken. I am placing Kanji of the Year together with the Jiyu Kokuminsha contest for the purposes of this analysis, but there are obvious and notable differences between lists of ephemeral buzzwords created by a dictionary publisher and the products and efforts of the mega-cultural assemblage that is Kanken.7 Kanken’s battery of famously challenging exams on Chinese characters has become a massive industry. The self-appointed “guardians of the characters” (Taipei Times 2013: 6) administer the exams and issue certificates for different skill levels in reading and writing kanji and identification of character stroke orders. Many public schools, universities, and corporations use these exams as part of their entrance requirements. The arduous study and investment in study aids and exam-taking events are much more than a lucrative enterprise. The fact that millions of Japanese of all ages invest energy and money into a range of materials and nationally recognized tests of their own written language is an extraordinary thing. Although the English “spelling bee” is similar in some ways (see Shankar, Chapter 5, this volume), it is not as extreme as Kanken in its reach, cachet, and degree of commitment. For example, 2,261,539 people took Kanken exams in 2012, of which only 1,130,852 passed them.8 Adults well past school age continue to participate in Kanken exams, sponsored courses, and purchase of educational materials (magazines, a journal, and books) as part of their professional development and to earn a rank that can be listed on their resumes. Thus, Kanken is tied into a system of social capital similar to other cultural certification industries such as the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and martial arts. Level 1, the last level of the menu of exams, is passed by only a small number of people. Annually, only about one thousand people who have progressed through the prior nine levels are even eligible to take this exam or register for it, and of those only about 150 pass. Kanken moved its headquarters to a new location in Higashiyama, Kyoto in 2016. The site includes an impressive new kanji museum and library. Construction was estimated at two billion yen (Asahi Shimbun Digital 2016).

52

Language and Materiality

The museum features games, video installations, and a tower, with its surface covered with as many as 50,000 kanji. Kanken hopes to attract 200,000 visitors annually to the museum. The winning Chinese character as Kanji of the Year is announced every December as part of a grand spectacle on the grounds of Kyoto’s gorgeous Kiyomizu temple. Kanken’s stated goal in creating this event was to promote traditional calligraphy and the learning of kanji. Of course, if people purchased Kanken’s kanji dictionaries and study aids, that would help in this process. It is not clear what role the Kanji of the Year t-shirt and tote bag (available for purchase on their website) play in this effort, however.9 The general public is invited to submit candidates for kanji that express a major event or reflect a general sentiment of the year. Unlike Jiyu Kokuminsha’s New and Trendy Word Grand Prix, the winning Kanji of the Year is often quite negative. For many years voters in the contest exhibited a strange preoccupation with apocalyptic themes found in the news, including various scandals and natural disasters. When Chinese characters were borrowed into Japanese, they were used in two ways: to represent native Japanese words (reading the character as Japanese is called kun’yomi) and to represent Japanese approximations of the Chinese pronunciations used for the borrowed character (reading the character as such is called on’yomi). Some kanji might have several possible readings of both types. The intent of the creators of the Kanji of the Year contest was not to focus on one possible kun’yomi (Japanese) reading of the character or one possible on’yomi (Chinese) reading, although for convenience one is selected by journalists as the main reading. In some ways the event is similar to Hangeul Day in South Korea held on October 9, also a celebration of a writing system. In 1998 the winner was the kanji for poison, virus, venom, or germ, read as doku, and in 2001 it was the character for war, battle, or fighting, which may be read as sen, ikusa, or tataka. The Kanji of the Year in 2007 was for imitation, deception, bogus, or fake, read as nise or gi. That was a year crammed with disturbing revelations about mislabeled food, expired food, falsified documents, and missing pension records. For example, there were claims that Chinese manufacturers were adding strange matter into imported food products. The contest in 2011 was the largest ever, with nearly a half-million votes cast. In 2007, by contrast, only around 91,000 people voted for the Kanji of the Year. Voting can be done online by logging onto the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society’s website, by mailing them a postcard or sending a fax, or by leaving a paper ballot in designated canary-yellow ballot boxes located in hotels and shops. The staging of the Kanji of the Year announcement entails a giant square of Echizen washi paper set up in the precincts of Kiyomizu temple. Conveying great intent and ceremonial flourish, the chief abbot executes the writing of

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

53

the kanji against the stunning backdrop of the main temple building and its immense wooden stilt foundations looming behind him. The head priest and master calligrapher, Mori Seihan, always offers a pithy statement to the waiting TV crews and reporters after the kanji selection is finished. Mori has become something of a celebrity as a result of the Kanji of the Year event, and people pay to see him speak at cultural centers around the country. He is the author of several books (Mori 2005, 2010), and his calligraphy works, as well as replicas of his calligraphy, are sold in art stores and online shops for a nice profit. On Amazon one may buy CDs of his sermons, and his calligraphy scrolls of a ritual Buddhist recitation sell for up to US $3,500. He appears in Japanese manga (comics) and on television. The photos of Mori approaching the blank white space of the washi board allow people to play with this image by placing any symbol or character in the space. It has become a popular meme used for political and social critique as well as humor. Thousands of internet sites and popular blogs contain the iconic scene of Abbot Mori standing in front of the white washi board with calligraphy brush in hand, but with the Kanji of the Year photoshopped out of the image and replaced with emoticons, smiley faces, advertisements, nuclear warning symbols, and other inelegant script and symbols. One example is by a comic artist named Kishino Takeshi, who used the kanji unveiling scene as the setting for some political satire (see Image 3.1).10 In Image 3.1, the large kanji are read as gorin, the term for the Olympic Games and the basis for the selection of the 2013 Kanji of the Year (rin). But in small script next to the kanji go, which also has the meaning of number five, “ten million yen” is written. If you read left to right, it is “fifty million yen.” Abbot Mori is looking at the whiteboard in surprise, while in front another Buddhist priest is strong-arming Tokyo governor Inose Naoki, who was instrumental in getting the Olympic bid for Tokyo in 2020, but was also involved in a personal loan scandal of millions of yen (he resigned not long after Kishino drew this). Kanji of the Year has become a civic idiom for the annual zeitgeist of Japan. The process of language materiality is nicely illustrated through the case of the Kanji of the Year for 2011. The winning character was for the concept of bonds, ties, fetters, or yoke, which has the Chinese readings (on’yomi) of han or ban, and Japanese readings (kun’yomi) of kizuna and tsunagu. In the press and in other references, the kanji is most often read as kizuna. Abbot Mori’s summary was “People in Japan and around the world are now trying to work together hand-in-hand toward reconstruction from the earthquake disaster” (Asahi Shimbun Digital 2011). The succinct public expressions of cyclical moral panics and apocalyptic fears that normally surface in Kanji of the Year erupted into an expression of national hope and validation through the keyword kizuna. The advent of an actual tragedy on an unbelievable scale temporarily

54

Language and Materiality

Image 3.1 Governor Inose and fifty million yen

turned the tables on widespread malaise and generated a hopeful, optimistic faith in community effort. This Kanji of the Year became wildly commodified, spreading to numerous domains. After the contest the character winners take on a stand-alone status as emblems that are essential to a commodification process. The form matters: the kanji are not simply representations of a piece of spoken language. The vitalization of kizuna is extraordinary considering the clunky kanji used for writing it. It is an inelegant construction of eleven strokes, and it is not even one of the basic “education kanji” (ky¯oiku kanji) that children are taught in primary school. This kanji set is determined by the Ministry of Education and contains a total of 1,006 characters. A key aspect of the kizuna kanji’s written form is the aesthetic value attributed to it after Abbot Mori produced his calligraphic masterpiece at the splendid unveiling event. Giving aesthetically pleasing written forms to a concept is a type of materiality that, of course, has a venerable history in Japan, because calligraphy has been an esteemed fine art known as shod¯o for centuries. There are many other examples of the objectification and commodification of the character for kizuna, although not all cases provide the same visually pleasing outcomes.

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

55

In December 2013, a farmer in Fukushima came up with an idea to help his declining sales of apples. By attaching a film with the kizuna kanji to the surface of ripening apples, he could prevent that part of the skin from turning red. When the film is removed the apples have a lighter colored kizuna kanji on them (Fukudome 2013). The Aqua World Ibaraki Prefectural Oarai Aquarium trained its California sea lion named Koko-chan to draw the kanji for kizuna on her very own miniature white board (à la Abbott Mori) and posted images and statements about the event.11 The kizuna kanji was popular in summer Obon festivals where it was written on mountainsides with fire or with objects such as lanterns arranged in the character’s shape.12 The Honda car manufacturer began to send out posters, stickers, and website headings featuring the kizuna kanji next to the refrain, “Give it your best, T¯ohoku (Northeast region).” Soon after the announcement of the Kanji of the Year, breweries began to place the kizuna character on the labels of commemorative bottles of Hachinohe sake and Satsuma sh¯och¯u liquor. The concept of kizuna has little to do with sake, apples, cars, or sea lions, so it was the objectified insignia that had value for these uses. For a short duration the use of kizuna may have boosted sales and added face value to the groups using it because it lent a degree of pious gravity that enhances public image-making. Kizuna is also a buzzword that has surfaced in discourses surrounding fostering and adoption in Japan. Goldfarb (2016) notes that the concept of kizuna has been used as a counter to the idea of “blood ties,” celebrating adoptive and foster families as engaged in the active construction of bonds. Some Japanese writers used the meaning of kizuna to understand postdisaster social trends, including marriage and infidelity. In these cases the term might be considered a new addition to the menu of characteristics that are touted as signposts for Japanese uniqueness. One author, for example, stated, “It means human ties, especially the kind nurtured by Japanese society and culture” (Japan Today 2012). According to this staff writer, an example of kizuna is the phenomenon of married men worried about the welfare of old girlfriends after the disasters, contacting them to make sure they were fine. These contacts then led to renewal of those relationships. Celebration and attention to Kanji of the Year also spread across borders into non-Japanese spaces. In the case of the 2011 winner, the Japanese government and other cultural groups heavily promoted the kizuna kanji. Bureaucrats from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been at the forefront of efforts to promote awareness and aid for the March 2011 disaster through the use of the concept of kizuna, which they usually translate as “bonds.” Through the Japan Foundation they began a worldwide Kizuna Project that sponsors around 10,000 young people from forty-one countries to visit disaster-affected areas and engage in volunteer activities.13 The affiliated Japan Center for International Exchange collected donations and provided rubber wristbands to American donors with

56

Language and Materiality

the kizuna kanji on them. American media often pitched the term kizuna as that of the bonds of friendship, rather than the strong bonds of community or family as used in Japan. For example, a news article proclaimed, “Japan Prime Minister Visit to U.S. Promotes ‘Kizuna’ and ‘Tomodachi’” (tomodachi is the word for “friend,” RTT News 2012). Local consulates also ran their own kizuna events, such as an exhibition of pictures drawn by children from the earthquake and tsunami zone at the Japanese consulate in Chicago, also named the Kizuna Project. In 2014 the consulate sponsored a third iteration of the event titled “Exhibit Kizuna 3: Unbroken Circle.” Nongovernment people and groups also latched on to the kizuna kanji. During the years after 2011 it was easy to locate kizuna in a range of unusual contexts. The Buddyclub Motor Sports Equipment Company held a charity named kizuna, and on its international webpage there is a box that says “Give it your best Japan” in Japanese, and “Buddy stand with you” in English next to kizuna spelled out in the Latin alphabet and also in kanji form.14 The Japan Society of Northern California hosted the Berkeley Japanese Kite Festival during the summer of 2012 with the theme of kizuna and launched into the sky a giant kite with its kanji written on it.15 Tattoos (often poorly executed) of the kizuna kanji became a frequent emblem on American bodies. It is now a regular offering on the menu of “symbols” found in U.S. tattoo parlors. In these cases the material versions of the kizuna kanji, objectified as standing for solidarity with Japanese victims and often used as a marketing ploy, took on associations of internationalism and awareness of Japanese trends and attitudes. These types of marketing of the kanji with one preferred reading actually undermine the stated goals of Kanken. When Mori performs the writing of a kanji at Kiyomizu temple, it is not a “word” that is being expressed, but a character that has morphemic reference and multiple readings. The intent of the creators of the Kanji of the Year was not to focus on one reading, but to highlight the many possible Sino-Japanese and native Japanese pronunciations of individual characters. Many calligraphy associations and schools in Japan also believe that the form of a character is more worthy than attaching a specific meaning to it. On the web blog Language Log, regular contributor Victor Mair, who posts about Chinese language and writing systems, wrote about the kizuna kanji and the problems with how the foreign press kept labeling it as a word rather than a character that can represent different morphemes (Mair 2011). Posted comments from blog readers ranged from puzzled to furious, with some linguists and language groupies protesting that is makes no sense to have writing that does not always represent the same word. There does not appear to be negative spillovers from global bombardment with the term kizuna, and perhaps it may join karaoke, anime, and futon as one

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

57

of the better-known words of Japanese origin (however, there is some domestic criticism; see the later discussion). Because the government-sponsored promotion of “Cool Japan” (an exuberant campaign that reified global male interest in maid cafés, comics, animation, and games; see Miller 2011a) began to seem in bad taste immediately after the tsunami and earthquake disasters, kizuna was a useful keyword replacement. Kizuna had the capacity to respectfully point to the disasters while simultaneously encoding positive affect. It deflected attention away from government failures in aiding victims and addressing the Fukushima nuclear power plant leakage and meltdown. Thus, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs simultaneously promotes kizuna events alongside rhetoric and reassurances that northeastern agricultural produce and seafood are completely safe and free of contamination. Yet, by continually using the word kizuna in so many postdisaster contexts, the government has also forced all the air out of it. It is keeping it afloat through various initiatives and campaigns long after it ceased being a pivotal term in private conversations and consciousness. This type of objectification occurs with many culturally laden Japanese concepts, which culture brokers, cultural gatekeepers, and government and tourism promoters employ with great abandon. For example, for nearly four decades the term furusato (old hometown), denoting a national nostalgia for a long ago past that never actually existed, served as a powerful keyword in government and commercial tourism campaigns (Robertson 1991). The overuse, objectification, and commodification of kizuna have not gone unnoticed in Japan. One well-known TV celebrity and comic artist named Ebisu Yoshikazu admitted in interviews and a book that words such as kizuna have a preachy quality that makes him uncomfortable (Ebisu 2014). He notes that there are people like him who exist outside such glorified “bonds.” For Ebisu, concepts such as kizuna are linked to state pressure on citizens to experience the world a certain way. In a sense, he sees the term kizuna as a tool or weapon used by a conservative government to coerce conformity. Conclusion Linguistic forms are objectified and circulated as novel products in many domains. For example, in my study of the language used in the beauty industry, I found that specialists who work with language are a critical part of the industrialization of beauty and body aesthetics, and that the words and concepts they create and use are integral to its construction and value (Miller 2006). Similarly, the value of the linguistic commodities generated from the contests discussed in this chapter is derived not from their inherent meanings, but from how they become evaluated and picked up in a particular cultural moment according to ongoing and changing sensibilities.16

58

Language and Materiality

There is no evident overheating of the language contest market, and each year Japanese and foreign media breathlessly report on the U-Can New and Trendy Word Grand Prix and the Kanji of the Year. Unfettered from their origins, given rankings and disquisitions, animated in media and crystallized into something concrete, these pieces of language are evidence of Japanese linguistic cool. Successful objectification of language – the ability of these words and graphs to travel or to be taken up and spread widely – depends not only on new paths of circulation but also on several other factors. These word commodities are part of a quest for fame; they illustrate an increasing unwillingness of the public to ignore political missteps and bloopers. They also illustrate an expanded role of entertainment language brokers who exploit the entrepreneurial potential of words, and they are proof that language products can productively be mined for profit by publishing and entertainment corporations. The Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year similarly promote an ideology of linguistic cleverness. These contests imply that the Japanese are particularly good at making up novel coinages and are appreciative enthusiasts of the aesthetics of language forms. Gay speech, Osaka dialect, girls’ slang, political gaffes – all of it enters into the mix. This landscape of buzzwords and Chinese characters pushes Japan yet again into a global space of innovation. The manner in which new words are created in Japanese conforms to the same morphological processes that we find in other languages, such as compounding, affixation, truncation, and so on. These word and kanji contests are interesting not so much for illustrating how these morphological formations yield new coinages, but for how they illustrate a shift in thinking about linguistic forms as commodities with value. Shankar and Cavanaugh (2012) describe some of the processes that create an objectification of language and are careful to note that it does not necessarily entail its commodification as well. Words and kanji from the contests are shared and appraised just as are other material forms of culture, such as brand goods and hairstyles. The words and Chinese characters are first objectified – that is, taken from the abstract transient realms of speech or imagination – and then instantiated as concrete examples of materialized language in lists, calligraphy artifacts, coffee mugs, t-shirts, Lolcat memes, and elsewhere. Looking closely at the Word Grand Prix and the Kanji Contest provides insight into how language becomes a type of material practice. The aesthetic and commodified oeuvre of these contests also represents particular aspects of Japan the world has come to expect: beauty, weirdness, and innovation. N OT E S 1 Outside Japan, scholars have studied other popular language competitions, such as the Corsican spelling contest studied by Jaffe (1996), the Norwegian dialect contest examined by Strand (2012), and the National Spelling Bee in the United States and elsewhere by Shankar (see Chapter 5, this volume).

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

59

2 Another language-related event is the Salaryman Poem (sarariiman senry¯u) contest sponsored by Daiichi Life Insurance since 1988. The general public submits seventeen-syllable humorous poems each December, and the top ten winners are announced three months later. The poems lament the everyday problems and concerns faced by white-collar workers, from disrespectful co-workers to awful boxed lunches. They are published in newspapers, magazines, and compilations. 3 Another popular expression that was excluded from the contest in 1996 was furin wa bunka da (infidelity is part of culture), a comment made by former actor and celebrity, Ishida Junichi. 4 The language of gay and transgender celebrities in Japan is analyzed by Abe (2010) and Maree (2013). 5 Many of the Word Grand Prix winners are crafted from loanwords or putative loanwords, which may add a dimension of freshness or novelty. Even so, the creation and use of loanwords or pseudo-loanwords itself are not new trends, and the work that goes into their construction is often recognized and celebrated (Miller 1997). 6 For a detailed discussion of the hinkaku boom, see Hirakawa (2011). 7 Unfortunately, Kanken was involved in a major scandal that erupted in 2009 when financial irregularities were exposed. The company was a type of nonprofit foundation, yet the chief director Okubo Noboru and his son were eventually given prison sentences for funneling nearly 40 percent of the organization’s profits (around US $25 million) into their own privately held companies. These included a family paper firm, used to print the actual tests, as well as their real estate business, including a building and other offices owned by the Okubo family and rented to Kanken. There was also a trail of bribery to local politicians and bigwigs; gift funds were also given to certain Kyoto temple administrators. 8 Figures for the number of applicants from the official Kanken website. Nenkan shigansha-s¯u oyobi g¯okakusha-s¯u no suii (Changes in annual number of applicants as well as successful applicants). Accessed February 10, 2016. www.kanken.or.jp/ kanken/investigation/transition.html 9 It is possible to do Kanji of the Year divination. One goes to the website, enters his or her name in a box, and presses enter, and a scroll appears on a new page with a personalized Kanji of the Year, which will be characters representing the guiding forecast. Kotoshi no kanji uranai (Kanji of the Year Divination). Accessed February 10, 2016. http://kkanji.net/ 10 The blog by Kishino Takeshi is Mattari Takeshi no oekaki keijiban (Bulletin Board of the Drawings of Chillin’ Out Takeshi), posted on December 12, 2013. Accessed February 25, 2016. http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/takeshioekaki/64246414.html 11 Ibarki Prefectural Oarai Aquarium, staff blog, December 27, 2012. Accessed February 10, 2016. www.aquaworld-oarai.com/staff-blog/secret/20111227-1445 12 Nishikawa (2011) describes one of the lantern festivals. 13 “Kizuna Project: Strengthening the Bond between the U.S. and Japan through Student Exchange.” Accessed December 19, 2015. www.cgp.org/announcements/ kizuna-project-strengthening-the-bond-between-the-u-s-and-japan-throughstudent-exchange 14 The website is at www.buddyclub.com. Accessed on February 10, 2016. 15 Japan Society of Northern California events website, www.usajapan.org/event/ berkeley-japanese-kite-festival. Accessed February 10, 2016.

60

Language and Materiality

16 Another interesting form of linguistic commodification is seen in young women’s script innovations (Miller 2011b). Novel graphs that began as in-group writing were eventually used on notepads, book covers, and other merchandise targeting young women.

REFERENCES Abe, Hideko. 2010. Queer Japanese: Gender and Sexual Identities through Linguistic Practices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Asahi Shimbun Digital. 2016, February 10. Kanji my¯ujiamu, Gion ni rokugatsu kaikan kotoshi no kanji tenji (Kanji Museum, opening of new hall in Gion in June, to display Kanji of the Year). Accessed February 10, 2016. www.asahi.com/articles/ ASJ295J2KJ29PLZB015.html Asahi Shimbun Digital. 2011, December 12. Kotoshi no kanji wa kizuna (The Kanji of the Year is kizuna). Accessed February 10, 2016. www.asahi.com/special/10005/ OSK201112120036.html Bando, Mariko. 2006. Josei no hinkaku (The Dignity of the Woman). Tokyo: PHP Shinsho. Block, David. (in press). “What Is Language Commodification?” In Sloganizations in Language Education Discourse, edited by S. Breidbach, L. Küster, and B. Schmenk. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Duchêne, Alexandre, and Monica Heller, eds. 2013. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit. London: Routledge. Ebisu, Yoshikazu. 2014. Hitoribotchi o warauna (Don’t Laugh at Being Alone). Tokyo: Kadokawa. Fujiwara, Masahiko. 2005. Kokka no hinkaku (The Dignity of the Nation). Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Fukudome, Yosuke. 2013, December 11. “Fukushima “Kizuna” Kanji Apples Prove A Big Local Hit.” Asahi Shimbun, Accessed December 19, 2015. http://ajw.asahi .com/article/0311disaster/recovery/AJ201312110008 Gendai Y¯ogo no Kiso Chishiki Hensh¯ubu. 2014. Gendai Y¯ogo no Kiso Chishiki (Fundamental Knowledge of Contemporary Words). Tokyo: Jiyu Komuminsha. Goldfarb, Kathryn. 2016. “Coming to Look Alike’: Materializing Affinity in Japanese Foster and Adoptive Care.” Social Analysis 60(2):47–64. Hardacre, Helen. 2007. “Aum Shinriky¯o and the Japanese Media: The Pied Piper Meets the Lamb of God.” History of Religions 47:171–204. Hill, Jane. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Hirakawa, Hiroko. 2011. “The Dignified Woman Who Loves to Be Lovable.” In Manners and Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan, edited by J. Bardsley and L. Miller, 136–155. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jaffe, Alexandra. 1996. “The Second Annual Corsican Spelling Contest.” American Ethnologist 23(4):816–835. Japan Today. 2012, January 17. “‘Kizuna’ Takes Many Forms in Post-Disaster Japan, Including Marriage and Infidelity.” Accessed September 2, 2013. www.japantoday .com/category/kuchikomi/view/kizuna-takes-many-forms-in-post-disaster-japanincluding-marriage-and-infidelity

Japan’s Trendy Word Grand Prix and Kanji of the Year

61

Kamei, Hajime. 2011. “Shingo, ry¯uk¯ogo ni kakusareta kotoba no ru-ru (The Hidden Word Rules in New Words and Trendy Words).” In Kotodama: Ima hitsuy¯o na kotoba no chikara (Kotodama: Power of Current Core Words), edited by Gur¯obaru Puranetto Hen (Global Planet Editors), 84–85. Tokyo: San’ei Shobo. Mair, Victor. 2011, December 26. Kanji of the Year: The Tie that Binds. Language Log (blog). Accessed May 19, 2014. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3666 Maree, Claire. 2013. “Writing on¯e;: Deviant Orthography and Heteronormativity in Contemporary Japanese Lifestyle and Culture.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture and Policy 147:98–110. McCurry, Justin. 2007. “Japanese Minister Wants “Birth-Giving Machines”, aka Women, to Have More Babies.” The Guardian, January 28. www.theguardian.com/ world/2007/jan/29/japan.justinmccurry McLaughlin, Levi. 2012. “Did Aum Change Everything? What Soka Gakkai Before, During, and After the Aum Shinriky¯o Affair Tells Us about the Persistent “Otherness” of New Religions in Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 39(1): 51–75. Miller, Laura. 2006. Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2011a. “Cute Masquerade and the Pimping of Japan.” International Journal of Japanese Sociology 20(1):18–29. 2011b. “Subversive Script and Novel Graphs in Japanese Girls’ Culture.” Language & Communication 31(1):16–26. 1997. “Wasei eigo: English “Loanwords” Coined in Japan.” In The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright, edited by J. Hill, P. J. Mistry and L. Campbell, 123–139. The Hague: Mouton/De Gruyter. Mori, Seihan. 2005. Kiyomizudera mandara (Kiyomizu Temple Mandala). Tokyo: Shunjūsha. 2010. Kokoro o tsukamu (Catching Hold of the Heart). Tokyo: Kōdansha. Nagumo, Seiichi, director. 2007. Haken no hinkaku (The Dignity of The Temp). Nippon Television Network, TV drama series. Nishikawa, Maya. 2011, August 27. “Lantern Lighting Festival Has Special Meaning for 2011.” Asian American Press. Accessed February 10, 2016. http://aapress.com/ community/lantern-lighting-festival-has-special-meaning-for-2011/ Reader, Ian. 2000. Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinriky¯o. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Robertson, Jennifer. 1991. Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City. Berkeley: University of California Press. RTT News. 2012, May 1. “Japan Prime Minister Visit to U.S. Promotes ‘Kizuna’ and ‘Tomodachi’.” Accessed December 19, 2015. www.rttnews.com/1873273/ japan-prime-minister-visit-to-u-s-promotes-kizuna-and-tomodachi.aspx Shankar, Shalini, and Jillian Cavanaugh. 2012. “Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:355–369. Sherzer, Joel. 2002. Speech Play and Verbal Art. Austin: University of Texas Press. ¯ Shinriky¯o to b¯oryoku (The Shimazono, Susumu. 1997. Gendai sh¯uky¯o no kan¯osei: Omu Potentiality of Contemporary Religion: Aum Shinriky¯o and Violence). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.

62

Language and Materiality

Shimotani, Nisuke. 2006. Shingo, ry¯uk¯ogo karuta (New Words and Trendy Words Card Game). Tokyo: Jiyu Kokuminsha. Silverstein, Michael. 1996. “Monoglot Standard” in America. In The Matrix of Language, edited by D. Brenneis and R. Macauley, 284–306. Long Grove, IL: Waveland. Strand, Thea. 2012. “Winning the Dialect Popularity Contest: Mass-Mediated Language Ideologies and Local Responses in Rural Valdres, Norway.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(1):23–43. Taipei Times. 2013, June 26. “In Asia, Ancient Writing Collides with Digital Age.” Accessed July 25, 2013. www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2013/06/26/ 2003565713/2

4

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language Keith M. Murphy

Introduction On July 4, 2012, standing in the well of a packed lecture hall on the campus of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), just outside Geneva, particle physicist Joseph Incandela looked up at the hall’s projection screen and, with only a hint of nerves in his voice, uttered the following pronouncement: “If we combine the ZZ and gamma-gamma, this is what we get. They line up extremely well, and in the region of one hundred twenty five GV, uh, they combine to give us a – an ex – a combined significance of five standard deviations.” Before Incandela could even finish his words, the room erupted in roaring cheers. Flashbulbs illuminated the lecture hall. Physicist Peter Higgs, a Nobel laureate, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, removed his glasses, and wiped tears from his eyes as the applause thundered around him for several more minutes. For Higgs this event was the culmination of his life’s work, an official public declaration that the elementary particle that he had first theorized almost fifty years earlier had finally been observed. For the rest of the worldwide physics community the announcement of the Higgs boson, as the particle is known, signaled a radical shift in how physics itself is conceived. Beyond the physics community, however, reactions skewed somewhat differently. Alongside numerous news articles attempting to explain the complex science behind the particle’s discovery, several online publications chose instead to highlight a seemingly peculiar aspect of the announcement itself: the slideshow typeface used by the event’s second presenter, physicist Fabiola Gianotti. “Higgs Boson Discovery Announcement Made in Comic Sans,” proclaimed one headline (Rundle 2012); “CERN Scientists Inexplicably Present Higgs Boson Findings in Comic Sans,” read another (Byford 2012). Even the designer of the Comic Sans typeface himself, Vincent Connare, took to Twitter to poke fun at another CERN scientist, his friend Brian Cox, as well as his own creation: @ProfBrianCox what’s with the shit slides! [ . . . ] – Vincent Connare (@VincentConnare) 4 Jul 20121 63

64

Language and Materiality

And Connare was not alone. Within hours of the initial announcement, “Higgs,” “CERN,” and “Comic Sans” were all trending topics on Twitter, with “Comic Sans” soon surpassing even the phrase “god particle,” the sensationalized label for the Higgs boson that the news media had taken to using. In the comments sections of many news sites, blogs, and other online publications, and especially on Twitter, the reaction to CERN’s use of Comic Sans was fierce: aaaaah comic sans ruins science forever – Aaron Linde (@aaronlinde) 4 Jul 2012 just tuned into the live broadcast from CERN. first thing i see is comic sans glaring back at me. science is bringing me down, man. – Fyza Hashim (@14eleven) 4 Jul 2012 Can’t take research seriously if it is in comic sans . . . #higgs #higgsboson – Jackson James Wood (@_jjw_) 4 Jul 2012 Something I didn’t expect from the CERN announcement: Comic Sans. . . . COMIC SANS! Apparently there is no better typeface for particle physics. – brettflorio (@brettflorio) 4 Jul 2012 Seriously, I’m not a fan of bashing Comic Sans . . . but presenting your god particle research with it is like playing J. S. Bach on a ukulele. – Marcus Schaefer (@raketentim) 4 Jul 2012 Dear @CERN: Every time you use Comic Sans on a powerpoint, God kills the Schrödinger’s cat; Please think of the cat – Sinergia Sin Control (@fred_SSC) 4 Jul 2012

Indeed in the moments following CERN’s historic announcement, it seemed like much of the nonphysics world had found something other than the Higgs boson itself to focus on. Someone even posted an online petition asking Microsoft, the proprietor of Comic Sans, to officially rename the font Comic CERNs (Reid 2012), and Connare himself signed it. But not all of the reactions to the presentation were negative. While few online commenters stuck their necks out to defend the choice of Comic Sans, a number of people criticized those who felt so strongly – too strongly, presumably – about the font used by the scientists: Y’all can make fun of Comic Sans all you want when ∗ you∗ discover a fundamental new particle that’s a key to modern physics. – Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) 4 Jul 2012 But if you hate Comic Sans THAT much, you can do YOUR presentation on YOUR fundamental physics discovery in ANY font you like. #higgs #CERN – William Donohue (@wdonohue) 4 Jul 2012

To be sure, the tone of this commentary was largely tongue-in-cheek. The humor that comes from privileging the assessment of something as seemingly

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

65

Image 4.1 Four fonts

minor as a typeface over something as obviously major as a paradigm-shifting scientific discovery was just too hard to resist for many who participated in these discussions. But at the same time, the general critique of typeface appropriateness that these judgments represent was by no means merely a joke. Embedded in these comments, and in similar comments that have appeared in what have come to be called “fontroversies” in recent years (see Garfield 2010), is a widely shared and prominently expressed conviction, a “typeface ideology,” that certain kinds or genres of discourse and the particular text forms that give literal shape to those discourses should semiotically align in some recognizably suitable way – and if they do not, then public condemnation is an acceptable response. In this case online commenters reacted negatively to what they identified as a mismatch between the stereotyped qualities of scientific discourse – scholarly, serious, and sober – and the widely articulated, and widely denounced, fatuousness of Comic Sans, a font whose soft edges and rounded lines were designed to mimic the hand-lettered text used in comic books. What is revealed in this clash between CERN scientists and their online opponents is that typeface, like language (Duranti 2011), is not neutral, but is itself subject to and complicit in a range of cultural projects along various affective, ideological, and even political dimensions. In this chapter I explore how typeface, an ever-present formalization of language in the everyday world, mediates different ideological and affective relationships between differently situated cultural forms. I analyze three notable “fontroversies” – Comic Sans and “serious” discourse, Ikea’s adoption of Verdana, and Gill Sans and British nationalism – each of which roughly displays a different semiotic inflection (iconic, symbolic, and indexical, respectively; see Image 4.1). In examining these cases I show how typeface is not merely a formal stylization of some more fundamental script that is itself the target of

66

Language and Materiality

ideological intervention, as we see, for instance, in debates over orthographic standards (e.g., Jaffe et al. 2012), but instead acts as a locus of concentrated metadiscursive reflection and debate in its own right, and with its own effects. But this debate is not always, or even necessarily, about a particular typeface itself or even about language, although of course both are always implicated. Instead, as visible cultural forms appearing in specific discursive domains and text artifacts, and with particular semiotic associations, typefaces often operate as familiar mechanisms through which broader social and political struggles are able to unfold. What We Talk about When We Talk about Text Language is typically experienced through a number of different modes in everyday life. Speech is perhaps the most common, dominated by voiced phonetic forms sensed through the auditory channel or, for signers, manual signs sensed through the visual channel. Text, of course, is also quite common. Like speech, text is physical, in that it displays distinctive qualia perceivable by a sensing subject, but text is material in ways that vary considerably from speech. As Shankar and Cavanaugh (2012; Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014; Shankar 2015) have pointed out, relations between language and materiality manifest in many ways, including the material conditions that give rise to linguistic forms, the channels through which they circulate, configurations of linguistic and nonlinguistic signs, and much more. While many dominant models of language have focused on its status as an abstract system mostly or entirely separate from the material world in which it actually thrives, others – particularly those influenced by political economy and especially semiotics, with its attention to relations between material signs and the meanings they invoke – have always kept the material more or less in view (see Irvine, this volume). The material qualities of text-in-the-world tend to afford linguistic activities that are often foreclosed in speech. The activities in which we interact with text are kinds of language games, in Wittgenstein’s (2009) sense – but instead of blocks, slabs, and pillars, these games are played with books, screens, and letterforms. Interactions with text usually involve reading or writing, but those are not always the most significant aspect of the encounter. For example, we can interact with text as a form of play (Meacham 2013), as a means for creating memorable biographical artifacts (Nozawa 2007), and as the springboard for producing improvised prayer (Shoaps 2002). We integrate text production into professional development (Wilf 2013) and read texts aloud as opportunities for social engagement (Cody 2009). In other words, far from acting as a neutral medium through which information is simply “conveyed” by a writer to a reader, text is always socially situated in dynamic courses of action, emerging from but also giving meaning to the particular contexts in which it subsists

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

67

(Collins 1995). How text does that, however, is a matter of its specific manifestations. Although we may reflexively experience textual language as “just text,” it actually exists embedded in a rich stratigraphy of non-neutral forms – including a material substrate, orthography, and typeface, along with graphic layout, discourse genre, and more – all of which, both individually and as a bundle (Keane 2003), influence how we interact with the text. An elemental layer in this stratigraphy is a material substrate on which text is inscribed, the (usually) physical basis of some more complex text artifact (Silverstein 1996). The material substrate is particularly significant to the social life of text because different materials, such as a piece of paper, a metal sign, or a glass cell phone screen, afford different channels, rates, and kinds of circulation and consumption. For example, product catalogs both printed on paper and hosted on the internet can reach millions of people, but only the latter can do it instantly; and while the geosemiotics of urban space (Scollon and Scollon 2003) – the ways in which signage and other kinds of text “in place” are made meaningful – may display common or universal features, they are also highly susceptible to local, culturally shaped regimes of evaluation. In many ways the particular material form that a text artifact takes is precisely what activates the social force of text. For example, following Benedict Anderson’s (1991) analysis of the role played by “print capitalism” in the formation of modern nation-states, newspapers have been singled out as consequential mediators of various kinds of social action at different social scales. They can, for example, be used not only to promote and advocate particular linguistic forms and varieties (Cody 2009) but also to denigrate and devalue them (Fenigsen 1999). They can help shape public understandings of particular personas (Graham 2011) and facilitate shifting perceptions of cultural difference among a community of readers (Limerick 2012). And other sorts of paper text artifacts, such as documents, files, and lists, have been identified as critical, though often unrecognized, vectors of power and authority, especially within bureaucratic systems (Göpfert 2013; Hull 2003, 2008, cf. Blommaert 2004). The linguistic aspects of text artifacts must necessarily be inscribed in a recognizable writing system or script: an organized and standardized set of symbols used to visually (or sometimes tactually) represent the sounds of a given language or languages. These symbols can take many forms, including alphabets, in which letters represent one or two phonemes; syllabaries, in which symbols represent whole syllables (comprised of multiple phonemes); and ideographic systems, in which pictographic characters represent morphemes or words. Orthography generally refers to these symbols plus others, such as diacritics, numbers, punctuation, style conventions like bolding and emphasis, and rules for how all of this is organized. Even though two languages may share a script, they may not share the same alphabet, and the diacritics and punctuation required by each language may also vary. Thus, for example, English

68

Language and Materiality

and Swedish both use Roman script, but Swedish contains twenty-nine letters, including three vowels (å, ä, and ö) that are not included in the English alphabet. While orthographic systems serve the seemingly impartial purpose of giving basic shape to written language, they are of course not immune from cultural elaboration, contestation, and critique (see Miller, Chapter 3, this volume). This is especially true where some possible “choice” among textual alternatives can lead to, or exacerbate, political fragmentation. This can occur both “between” multiple languages, as with activist fights against Anglicized spelling and pronunciation of Hawaiian words in Hawaii (Romaine 2002) or the display of fraught allegiances indexed in the use of either Cyrillic or Roman script to represent English words in otherwise Russian-language signs (Angermeyer 2005), and “within” a single language, as in adjudicating whether to inscribe Tamil in a more “literary” or “colloquial” form (Cody 2009; Das 2011) or to use Roman script or an Inuit syllabary when representing Inuit language on street signs in northern Canada (Daveluy and Ferguson 2009). Indeed, political clashes over orthographic details are often staged as proxy battles within broader, ideologically charged ethnolinguistic campaigns (Jaffe 1996, 2013; Jaffe et al. 2012; Johnson 2002). In contrast to orthography, a typeface is a higher-level design or style involving systematic manipulation of the core features of a given script, but usually not so much manipulation that the underlying symbols are left unrecognizable as tokens of a given script type.2 For example, while the letter “x” can be printed in thousands of different typefaces, its essential form is generally fixed. Typefaces have names, such as Helvetica, Futura, Times, and Comic Sans for Roman script, and they group into families that share some basic features. The term “font” is more widely used than typeface in colloquial discourse, largely due to its endemic presence in consumer word-processing software, but there is a historical difference between the two terms: in traditional typesetting the word “font” refers to a complete set of letters and other characters in one typeface, one style (bold, italic, etc.), one weight (the thickness of its lines), and one size. However because this usage has faded over time, it is generally acceptable to use the terms “typeface” and “font” interchangeably. Only a few studies have examined the typographic qualia of text itself in their social-semiotic specificity. Even studies of orthographic conventions (e.g., Jaffe 1996; Johnson 2002; Wertheim 2012; cf. Järlehed 2015) tend to focus on the features of systems as a whole, rather than the details of individual letterforms, diacritics, and the meanings they carry. Van Leeuwen (2006), for instance, has attempted to develop a “grammar” of typographical detail that can account for systematic semiotic relations across typographical systems. From more culturally specific perspectives, both Miller (2011) and Vaisman (2014) have analyzed how young women (in Japan and Israel, respectively) use typographic play as both quasi-occult writing forms and means for projecting distinctively

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

69

female online identities. Spitzmüller (2012, 2015) has examined how distinctive characters in German script and blackletter (“Gothic”) typefaces have historically (and problematically) developed as signals of “Germanness” in written language. And Londoño (2015: 142) has argued that a particular kind of “brightly colored, bold-faced, gyrating typography with a hand-made quality of imperfection” has come to represent “Latino-ness” and mark Latino spaces in the United States. Thus any printed text we may encounter in everyday life is composed of a dense stratigraphy of semiotically loaded forms, including typeface, orthography, and a material substrate, each of which is meaningful and non-neutral in its own ways. There are other layers, too, including a letterform’s size, weight, and style, along with color and kerning (the space between letters), all of which are typically arranged in some graphic layout (see van Leeuwen 2006). As one of the most formally manipulable of these layers, typeface in its aesthetic particulars can become a critical source of meaning and a site for cultural intervention for various users of text, including readers, writers, the professionals who design text artifacts, and even people consuming text ambiently in the world around them. And in many cases, that meaning is pliable and shifting, publicly shared, laden with affect, and deeply connected to a range of distinct cultural values. These are the conditions within which fontroversies emerge. Comic CERNs The 2012 Higgs boson-Comic Sans controversy was not new for CERN. Several months earlier, in late 2011, CERN scientists had used Comic Sans in a media presentation announcing that a “glimpse” of the god particle had been detected. While this presentation was not as widely covered by the media as the later 2012 event, a similar kind of reaction surfaced on Twitter: I don’t care how important you think the Higgs Boson is, there is NEVER an excuse for comic sans MS. Not even in a postmodern ironic way. Benjamin Gray @benjaminfgray 13 Dec 2011 CERN may have discovered the Higgs Boson but they’re losing credibility due to their use of Comic Sans on diagrams. Victoria Ramon @JuliaChildCIA 13 Dec 2011 Seriously @CERN? Maybe the most important scientific discovery in 60 years and you chose . . . . Comic Sans? #higgs #Higgsupdate Tom Anthony @TomAnthonySEO 13 Dec 2011 I’m pretty sure the Nobel Committee will take @CERN’s use of Comic Sans into consideration when they award the next prize. Not looking good. Luke Scheybeler @LukeScheybeler 13 Dec 2011

70

Language and Materiality

Scientific discovery of the century – and they use Comic Sans on the PowerPoint! #Higgs #Epicfail Steve Holmes @SteveRHolmes 13 Dec 2011

And as in the later case, there were a few defenders of the font choice: Twitter outcry right now against Comic Sans being used in the PP at the #CERN conference. Chill – they’re scientists, not designers! 3seven9 @3seven9 13 Dec 2011

One prominent supporter, though his support was mild, was Vincent Connare, the Comic Sans designers who seven months later would take to Twitter to jibe the CERN scientists more forcefully. In a news article covering the presentation’s supposed font problem (Urquart 2011), Connare told the reporter, “Scientists and software engineers have skills and knowledge but often lack good design and dress sense. . . . I worked at Microsoft where it was not uncommon to see people in corporate t-shirts at the Christmas ball. I think it showed that Fabiola Gianotti [the physicist in charge] is an intelligent caring woman.” What all of these assessments – even the supportive ones – articulate is an ideology that presumes a commensurability of form between a particular kind of discourse and the graphic system that represents it. That is to say, this stance posits that the typeface used to present a specific discourse genre should iconically match the genre and its attendant associations, and in doing so the typeface itself should fade from recognition. Typefaces that are perceived to be too informal or are associated too closely with low-prestige text forms should not, so it goes, be used to give shape to explicitly formal, high-prestige text like the kind of scientific information presented at CERN. Typefaces like Times New Roman, Garamond, and Baskerville – with serifs and straight letterforms and adjustable spacing between letters – are acceptable for this task. Comic Sans, with its simplistic curvilinear forms and associations with low-prestige comic strips, is not. Connare designed Comic Sans while working as a typographic engineer for Microsoft in the early 1990s, and it has been included as a system font in Windows operating systems since the release of Windows 95. He originally intended for the font to be used in programs aimed at children and computer novices (Postdesk 2011) and thus attempted to create typographic forms that were less intimidating than more traditional typefaces. Many of those traditional fonts, such as Times New Roman and Helvetica, were developed long before the advent of general desktop computing; as such they conform to nondigital printing and signage layout standards and thus are not ideal for viewing on flickering computer monitors. But Comic Sans was one of the first fonts designed specifically for use on this emerging material substrate. Because the

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

71

font is easily legible for the children and new computer users whom Connare had targeted, within a few years the typeface had become hugely popular. But alleged misuses of Comic Sans began to arise. While bake sale advertisements and informal signs warning office workers to “please wash your dishes” are generally considered acceptable uses of Comic Sans, texts addressing more serious or emotional topics – I recently saw a flyer at a hospital with the question “Do you suffer from anxiety or Bipolar Disorder?” emblazoned in Comic Sans – are not. One prominent example occurred in 2007, when NBA star LeBron James left his hometown basketball team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, for a more lucrative and prestigious spot on the Miami Heat, a rival team. In response to this move the owner of the Cavaliers, Dan Gilbert, posted an angry and sarcastic open letter to Cavaliers fans on the team’s website, mocking James and his decision. But the letter was printed entirely in Comic Sans (Biderman and Steel 2010), a choice that seemed to severely downgrade the force of his words. In 2002, in response to these kinds of alleged misuses of Comic Sans, two young graphic designers started a quasi-satirical campaign called Ban Comic Sans to agitate against the spread and popularity of the font in inappropriate text genres. On the campaign’s website, which was still active as of 2015 but is no longer on the Web, the founders stated their position forcefully: Like the tone of a spoken voice, the characteristics of a typeface convey meaning. The design of the typeface is, in itself, its voice. Often this voice speaks louder than the text itself. Thus when designing a “Do Not Enter” sign the use of a heavy-stroked, attentioncommanding font such as Impact or Arial Black is appropriate. Typesetting such a message in Comic Sans would be ludicrous. Though this is sort of misuse is frequent, it is unjustified. Clearly, Comic Sans as a voice conveys silliness, childish naivete [sic], irreverence, and is far too casual for such a purpose. It is analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume.

The notion that particular semiotic relations inhere between a typeface, the text or text fragment it gives shape to, and the referent of the text or its discourse genre has long been recognized, though not necessarily clearly understood. In the 1920s Poffenberger and Franken (1923: 312), for instance, noted, “The belief is fairly general that heavy faced type carry with them the atmosphere or feeling of solidarity and strength, and that the thin faced type suggest fineness and delicacy.” This origin of this supposed “atmosphere” of type – the capacity to reflect rather blunt affective categories such as (according to Poffenberger and Franken) “cheapness,” “dignity,” “luxury,” and “strength” – has been attributed to a number of factors, including the qualia of type itself, such as “their shape, size, texture and the character of their lines” (Poffenberger and Franken 1923: 328), as well as the associations that arise from repeated exposure to the materiality of type as specific kinds of text artifacts bearing particular typefaces circulate in relatively narrow contexts of use. In more recent years, as

72

Language and Materiality

the Ban Comic Sans manifesto attests, typeface has been granted a more anthropomorphized material identity, including a “voice” (Childers and Jass 2002) or “personality” – the tone and connotation that a typeface projects through its particular formal “anatomy” (Mackiewicz 2005)3 – which professionals such as technical communicators treat as significant to a text artifact’s readability and persuasive power. And studies comparing the general perception of typeface “connotation” among groups with different levels of typographic sophistication reveal that professionals, novices, and amateurs alike all exhibit similar basic sensitivities to the indexical meanings of specific fonts (Tannenbaum, Jacobson, and Norris 1964). While the Comic Sans fontroversy, and CERN’s role in it in particular, has unfolded mostly in jest,4 among graphic designers, technical communicators, and typographers the underlying ideology prioritizing the commensurability of forms is actually quite significant. Fontroversies like this one, centered on iconicity and typeface appropriateness, are not primarily concerned with how an individual reader confronts a text, but with socially mediated, publicly circulating ideologies about how information “should” be shaped and delivered by the social actors who select particular fonts from among the dozens usually at their disposal. And this concept of “choice,” that somebody was faced with a range of options but selected the wrong one, is critical. At the core of most fontroversies sits an expectation that type and text, or type and other layers in the semiotic stratigraphy, will somehow align, such that the match between typeface and the meanings and values communicated by the typeface is perceived as appropriate and transparent. However when a perceived mismatch does occur, the discordance is not only noticeable but is also interpreted as a kind of moral transgression on the part of those who have chosen to use the offending typeface. To select a “bad” font or the “wrong” font, according to the logic of this ideology – especially when using a low-prestige font for a serious or high-prestige genre – degrades the integrity of the forms and values mediated by the typeface. These fontroversies are centered on a typeface ideology that stresses an iconic match between font qualia and the qualia of discourse genre or tone, but of course such matches between forms can never be exact in every case. Any given text genre can be suitably represented (i.e., without contestation) in a number of typographical forms, and any given typeface can suitably represent many genres. But there are also limits to these suitable alignments, limits that online fontroversies are aimed at identifying and attempting to legislate. In the context of design style I have previously discussed the concept of “semiotic tolerance” (Murphy 2013), which posits that when forms of different kinds are meaningfully aligned there is a gap within which their matching can credibly hold. Iconic relations extending between different forms – like scientific discourse and an appropriate typeface – are not always obvious and not

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

73

always uniformly recognized. But the semiotic tolerance between these forms provides a space for debate, a space for people invested in these forms and their relations to discuss how and why these forms match, or how and why they do not.5 Verdanagate While language itself played a significant role in the Comic CERNs fontroversy, other fontroversial cases are less focused on language than on the relations between typeface and other cultural forms and values in the typeface’s orbit. When Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, released its 2010 catalog in late 2009, many of the company’s fans took to the internet to express their anger – not at the company’s new line of home goods, but at the typeface used in the catalog. In a move that one popular online graphic design community dubbed “Verdanagate” (Vit 2009), Ikea sent out its 2010 catalog having replaced the familiar font it had long used for catalog copy, a specially modified version of Futura called Ikea Sans, with Verdana, a common typeface that, like Comic Sans, was originally designed for Microsoft. Though in this case the fontroversy remained largely confined to graphic design and typography communities, both Time Magazine (Abend 2009) and the New York Times (Rothstein 2009), among other media sources, elected to cover the story. The controversy first emerged on the English-language internet on the Typophile forums, a site catering to both professional and amateur fans of typography, when a Swedish poster named Raumschiff announced, It’s true. IKEA abandons 50 years of Futura and Century Schoolbook for [ . . . ] Verdana. In an interview with swedish design magazine CAP&DESIGN the reason for the change is to be able to use the same font i [sic] all countries, including asian countries. Also they want to be able to give the same visual impression both in print and the web. For me it’s a sad day. What are your thoughts on this matter?

In the Swedish-language article to which the poster refers (Wallén 2009), Ikea’s director of communications, Ivana Hrdlickova, explained that the need to maintain a consistent typographic profile across linguistic and national contexts, in both print and digital formats – both of which Verdana was designed to handle with relative ease – was more important to the company than preserving the Ikea Sans typeface. “Our identity doesn’t rest on the font,” she said. “Verdana is so easy and so neutral, we think we’ll maintain our identity with other elements: the language we choose, our message, the whole graphic profile. All the elements will play a part.” In other words, from the point of view of Ikea, the typeface was less significant than other layers in the semiotic stratigraphy.

74

Language and Materiality

But a few “voicy consumers” (Foster 2007) partial to Ikea disagreed with ˚ Hrdlickova’s claims. Swedish advertising copywriter Mattias Akeberg (2009) wrote on his blog, “Where Futura and Century Schoolbook have character and directly link that idea to the IKEA brand, Verdana is a super common webadapted typeface that’s neither more distinct nor more beautiful.” Commenter Mathis Lövström said bluntly of the need for global typeface consistency, “It may seem logical, but it’s wrong.” Back on the Typophile forum, the comments leaned more conspiratorial, with many speculating that Ikea made the switch because Verdana is much cheaper to license than a custom version of Futura: “I really think that this is a nasty case of a business being cheap.” And another elaborated even more: There’s a difference between financial pragmatism and just being cheap. The value of the Ikea brand has got to be tremendous, and they’ve spent decades and billions of dollars getting there. Changing to Verdana has given Ikea’s catalogs a very different feel – Verdana at large sizes simply does not have the warmth and cheer of Futura.

Some commenters even resorted to accusing Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, of ties to the Nazis, a familiar accusation in Sweden (see Murphy 2015). The most definitive analysis of the typeface switch appeared on the popular design blog IDSGN (Challand 2009) where a number of “before” and “after” catalog pictures were posted as evidence of what one commenter called “a disastrous move by a company that’s supposed to be design-led!”: -Aww, this is sad. I like Futura and though [sic] it fitted IKEA’s style of furniture designing well. -What . . . That doesn’t feel “Ikea” at all. Ikea almost owned Futura. Even without the pictures you could tell that it was Ikea. That’s what I called a great visual identity. -This just plain sucks. Futura is a gorgeous font and really suited Ikea’s simple, straightforward style. Verdana is mundane and has been done to death.

The issue at stake here was a brand failure or, at least, claims of brand failure. As with CERN’s use of Comic Sans, these commenters articulated a perceived mismatch between a typeface and what it represents, and framed their complaint (even more forcefully) in terms of a bad choice. Unlike the CERN case, however, which rested on a mismatched iconicity between discourse and typographic forms, the symbolic relationship between Futura as a typeface and Ikea as a company was more or less arbitrary, an association primarily based on many years of use by Ikea, rather than on any formal similarities – although some commenters did indeed posit a “fit” between font and furniture. Futura is a classic modernist font and Ikea sells contemporary modernist furniture,

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

75

and while Verdana, too, is a modernist font (as are hundreds of others), the long-standing match between Ikea’s brand and Futura in particular had been cultivated and naturalized by the company to the point that a change in font felt to some consumers like a betrayal. By switching from a familiar and respected font, especially one with a pedigree in modernist typeface design, to a familiar but undistinguished font designed for everyday use, Ikea had violated its relationship with many of its customers, who saw the company’s reputation for design sensibility tarnished by its new font choice. If brands are “performative” (Nakassis 2012; Pang 2008) in their capacity to create and cultivate relationships between companies and customers, a good amount of that work is accomplished through manipulating affect (Foster 2007; Manning 2010; Mazzarella 2003; see also Shankar, Chapter 5, this volume), which is at least partly mediated by their particular aesthetic elements, including typeface. Research in academic marketing has identified typography as a central element in brand recognition, affiliation, and memory (Childers and Jass 2002), and experimental studies have shown that consumers prefer brand marks that use fonts that are somehow “appropriate” for representing the business itself (Doyle and Bottomley 2004, 2006; cf. Henderson, Giese, and Cote 2004). For companies like Ikea, typeface plays a prominent role in managing affective associations with the brand.6 A significant portion of Ikea’s brand is heavily reliant on affect-inflected concepts of domestic comfort, beauty, and intimacy (see Kristoffersson 2014). Similar to many other companies, Ikea attempts to promote positive relationships with consumers through the way it deploys its brand, which Ikea does in some specific ways. In addition to the post-purchase use of Ikea furniture in the home, which the company can only hope is experienced by consumers as comfortable and beautiful, the pre-purchase shopping experience in Ikea stores is designed to be a spectacle (see Murphy 2013, 2015). Fully decorated showrooms are complemented by large collections of display furniture, all of which customers are encouraged to use as if relaxing in their own homes. The Ikea catalog, which is sent to tens of millions of homes around the world every year, is replete with photographs of model rooms occupied by model families all performing model positive domestic experiences. And in stores across dozens of countries, in catalogs printed in dozens of languages, and on websites displayed in those languages, the same text is strewn across walls and pages and screens, text that not only describes the furniture’s details but also emphasizes its comfort and beauty. This highly controlled branding system attempts to bring into semiotic alignment a range of otherwise discontinuous things, including particular kinds of descriptive language, material objects like furniture and catalogs, digital and print photographs, curated retail spaces, and – crucially for the brand – concepts of comfort, beauty, and intimacy that all of these other phenomena are designed to support. It is a strategy that directly exploits linguistic

76

Language and Materiality

materiality, recognizing that the cultivation of specific affective stances requires attention to the relations between all of these brand fractions (Nakassis 2012) at once. But affect is “sticky,” in Sara Ahmed’s (2010) phrasing, alighting on ideas, values, and objects with variable intensities and bringing them into different sorts of alignment – and stickiness is not always controllable. When Ikea changed its typeface, the warmly positive affect once attached to Futura, a font described by several commenters as “beautiful,” was lost, and the negative affect linked to the more “mundane” Verdana began to seep into some consumers’ connection to the brand. Given all of the work that Ikea does to foster intimacy in relation to its brand, some sort of reaction to the new typeface was all but inevitable. Commenters expressed a range of emotional states with regard to the switch, including sadness, frustration, incredulity, and disappointment. Many were upset not only by the relative aesthetic merits of each font but also what the choice signaled about Ikea’s commitment to design, a value that has helped the company become the largest furniture retailer in the world. The newer font was both aesthetically and economically “cheaper,” commenters argued, and prioritizing cost over design was a betrayal of the company’s core values (an ironic position, given that Ikea’s business model is based on selling inexpensive furniture). Many warned that the company would pay a steep price for its folly. Yet after 2009 there were no signs of a downturn in Ikea’s fortunes: dire predictions of a font-based catastrophe did not come to fruition. Each subsequent version of the catalog, and in-store signage across the world, continued to be printed in Verdana. However while Verdanagate participants may not have won their fight with Ikea, similar fontroversies that emerged since then – most noticeably with The Gap in 2010 – resulted in companies reversing decisions to change typographic aspects of their brands. A Font, Sans Gill If some fontroversies concern iconic relations between language and typeface, and others, like Verdanagate, involve symbolic relations between typeface and other nonlinguistic phenomena, such as adjacent brand fractions, still others are focused more of the morality of choice and what is indexed in making that choice, embedded in using a particular font. Eric Gill (1882–1940) is a minor national treasure in the United Kingdom, though today there is a sort of “cultural intimacy,” in Herzfeld’s (2005) sense of shared collective embarrassment, in that appreciation. He was an artist who worked in a number of different media, but he is best known for his sculpture and type design. Gill’s sculptural works adorn a number of buildings in London, including the BBC’s Broadcasting House and Westminster Cathedral, as well as

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

77

other buildings elsewhere in Europe. His typographical pedigree was also quite sound. He apprenticed with calligrapher Edward Johnston, who designed the original typeface used in the London Underground, and his own most famous typeface, Gill Sans, is largely based on that font. Gill designed several other typefaces too, including Perpetua and Joanna, and for his contributions to art and typography he was named Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts, the highest honor a designer can receive in Britain. With such strong connections to such English and British things, Gill seems like an ideal representative of what a good Englishman should be. The problem, though, is that Eric Gill was also a sexual deviant. In 1989 author Fiona MacCarthy (1989) published a 300-page biography of Gill in which she recounted some of his most extreme predilections, including bestiality and incest, which Gill had logged in his diary with the casual insouciance of a disinterested chronicler. MacCarthy refused to sensationalize these newly revealed details, but neither did she dismiss them, insisting, instead, that they held a “very serious relevance” (MacCarthy 1989: 239–241) for understanding Gill as an artist. For fifty years Gill had occupied an exalted position in British culture. His sculptures were inextricably linked, quite materially, with some of the most significant institutions in British society, and his most famous typeface, Gill Sans, had attained a status that only a few fonts ever do: it was both widely used and widely adored. But with the publication of MacCarthy’s book, the British public was unsure what to think. In 1998, for example, after years of debate, advocates for sexual abuse survivors called for Westminster Cathedral to remove Gill’s sculptures from the church, but to no avail (Rohrer 2007). Indeed, the moral discordance that MacCarthy’s biography produced – is it OK for a contemporary designer to use a font created by a typographer with such aberrant behavior? – is still playing out, a quartercentury later. On many online forums and blogs geared toward typography professionals, the mere mention of Eric Gill or Gill Sans, even in purely technical typographic discussions, will still produce at least a few mentions of his personal life. Occasionally someone will call for a boycott of the font. In 2009 a poster named Jonathan posed the following quandary on the Typophile forums: i was recently asked to rework an outside designers input for promotional material prior to the receipt of final titles when i noticed that a bold Gill had been used [ . . . ] This work was for a family show across Scotland and as a [ . . . ] typeface geek i rapidly recalled the somewhat shocking revelations of Gills life throughout the early to mid 90’s where his extreme sexual misbehaviour was detailed. Not only was he prone to extra marital affairs (hardly unique) but also child abuse (his 2 daughters) incest (his sister) and most worryingly of all, ∗∗∗∗ (the family dog). I chose to avoid using Gill thereafter. Am i alone in this decision?

78

Language and Materiality

Most of the responses were sarcastic and critical of Jonathan’s position, asserting the clear futility of boycotting a font that has nothing whatsoever to do with its creator’s behavior. But a few responded with some sympathy: - Jonathan – you’re the first I’ve heard of avoiding Gill’s typefaces because of his personal behavior . . . Frankly I think there’s enough evil in the world ∗ right now∗ that I wouldn’t be worrying about the morality of using a dead man’s typeface. - This world is full of lovely typefaces who’s first connotation is something other than dog-shagging.

But the responses were not entirely dismissive: - I love the man’s type if not the man’s behavior, so I’ll go on using them. But kudos to you for your decision. I can’t fault that. - I would be sensitive to the use of Gill typefaces in something like a brochure for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, simply because if someone were to draw attention to Gill’s abuse of his daughters it would cloud the purpose of the brochure and may cause distress to the clients. This isn’t a matter of principle, but of sensitivity.

These comments reveal some potential pitfalls involved with the indexical ordering of typographical signs, as well as struggles with how to handle emergent indexical reshuffling when faced with a selection of typographic alternatives. From the perspective of a graphic designer, a typeface should be used to frame a text, to give it tone and texture, and signal a discourse kind, but for the reader the font should ultimately fade into the background. The perceived problem with Gill Sans, however, is that the font itself is intimately linked, at least in the United Kingdom, to the identity of its creator, Eric Gill, who was revealed to be linked with bestiality and incest. Through the indexical reordering that MacCarthy’s book brought forth, amplified by the continuous recirculation of the debate in the years that followed,7 the typeface now, according to the logic of these comments, inescapably indexes bestiality and incest through its association with Gill. As such, it should not be used at all, or only sparingly, and definitely not in text artifacts that have anything to do with sexual abuse, lest its use in such publications, through the presumed transparency of its indexical ordering, negatively affect a sexual abuse survivor. MacCarthy’s revelations also had bearing on Gill’s indexical standing with regard to the British nation. Whereas Gill had for decades stood as an honorable Briton who had contributed many well-known cultural works to the British public, including the Gill Sans typeface, his suddenly tainted reputation threatened to simultaneously taint the reputation of the nation with which he was indexically conjoined. Of course this general problem is not entirely uncommon. As mentioned earlier, allegations of Nazi ties have followed Ikea’s founder for decades, blemishing one of Sweden’s most potent national

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

79

symbols. And Martin Heidegger’s connection to the Nazi Party has cast a shadow over the man who is often described as Germany’s most significant twentieth-century philosopher (see, e.g., Faye 2011). In Gill’s case, while this indexical reshuffling was a general problem in the United Kingdom after his biography was published, some graphic designers and typographers accustomed to working with Gill’s fonts were compelled to reckon with the issue through their own professional concerns. Not only might the use of Gill Sans be a tacit endorsement of Gill’s unsavory behavior but it could also contribute to the debasement of the British national image by continuing to promote what was once a positive indexical relationship to Gill, despite his now decidedly negative associations. All fontroversies foreground a preference for felicitous matching between typefaces and other semiotic layers that surround them. In the case of Gill Sans, the details outlined in Eric Gills’ biography completely disrupted semiotic relations that had previously been treated as stable, at least for graphic designers, typographers, and allied professionals who pay the most attention to the details of text. Where the typeface had once been a suitable choice for almost any kind of discourse genre or text artifact, in the years following the release of MacCarthy’s book, using Gill Sans in one’s work became a glaringly non-neutral choice. Perhaps more than most other people, these professionals were well aware of the various links between Gill the typographer, his typefaces, his dishonored biography, and his status as a valued British persona, and they were trained to be aware of, and indeed rely on, the power of such links in their work. As such, the morality of font choice for them became a matter not just of professional responsibility but also of a heightened social responsibility. Would using the font in certain text artifacts negatively affect children or survivors of sexual abuse? Maybe it should not even be used at all, thereby removing one index of Eric Gill from everyday life and thus reconfiguring, if not totally erasing, his widespread presence as a sign of British nationalism. Thus while the scope of participation involved in this fontroversy was certainly small, especially compared with those of Comic CERNs and even Verdangate, the ambit of its moral consequences was quite extensive and profound. Conclusion In this chapter I examined three different fontroversies to explore some of the ways in which typefaces, as specific formalizations of language embedded in material text artifacts, are mobilized as a set of aesthetic qualities that help organize collective, mediated debates not just about language and text but also more generally about “appropriate” alignments of different cultural forms. The fontroversies are all differently scaled and differently politicized, and organized along different semiotic axes. The case against Comic Sans, based on a sense of

80

Language and Materiality

misaligned iconicity, is the longest running, most active, and perhaps strongest fontroversy to have emerged to date, and the ideological stance condemning the typeface has reached common-knowledge status among younger generations – at least on the internet. Verdanagate, in contrast, went nowhere. The online debate and news articles on the subject faded away, and since the publication of the 2010 catalog Ikea has continued to use Verdana for its text copy without issue. The once-sacred symbolic connection between Ikea and Futura is now a glimmer in the company’s past. Finally, Eric Gill will most likely continue to occupy an ambiguous position in the menagerie of significant British cultural figures, and while the Gill Sans typeface is still widely used and is under no serious threat, its status will always be up for questioning in light of Gill’s personal history. While all of these fontroversies may be different in scale and scope, they do share some common features that help constitute the fontroversy itself as an emergent genre of action. First, all fontroversies are collective moral deliberations about shaping some wider cultural landscape, even if they seem to manifest as public debates about the semiotics of typography. The three cases examined reveal that typeface works as a mediator between stratigraphically arranged forms that are all centered on text, including linguistic forms (like discourse genres), material forms (like catalogs and PowerPoint slides), conceptual forms (like beauty), affective forms (like despair and disgust), and social forms (like the nation). Indeed, all fontroversies reveal a particular sensitivity to typeface as a significant infratechnology (Murphy 2013), a basic technology embedded in more complex and visible technologies that in this case holds these layers together and helps order the relations between them in actual text artifacts. The fontroversy allows participants to display, contest, and work out alignments of various cultural values and their formal manifestations, and to express their understandings of how the stratigraphy is ordered. Some debates concern language itself, but often they focus on the relation of type and its associations to the nonlinguistic semiotic layers in which a text is embedded. In all of these cases, however, typeface renders language embedded in text artifacts a mechanism by which all sorts of cultural forms and values can be publicly displayed, discussed, and debated. Second, social media and the affordances of online communication are obvious requirements for fontroversies to thrive. Increased public attention to fonts in recent years beyond the world of graphic design is unquestioningly related to the rise of social media and other communication technologies, which not only place many typefaces in front of people’s eyes but also allow (and encourage) public, shared evaluation of those fonts. In this regard typeface is not unique: people hold and express ideological stances about lots of things – almost everything, really – and typeface is only one among them. Moreover, people really like to share those stances through social media. But precisely because typeface

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

81

is such a basic component of interaction with mobile technologies and is so ubiquitous in online communication, not to mention so many other text artifacts, it is prominently poised to receive a significant amount of critical attention in online forums. Third, fontroversies are never dispassionate evaluations of fonts and their meanings, but are always affectively inflected, as the portmanteau itself implies. While some participants may express basic feelings such as “liking” or “disliking” a given font, most of the “controversy” involves translating often inchoate experiences of affective intensities into verbal language, with results that are often blunt, sometimes extreme, and rarely explicitly emotional. The Comic CERNs fontroversy is, of course, largely a satirical social project. But alongside the ironic transformation of an innocuous font into a typographical pariah, something specific has occurred: lots of people actually respond negatively to the (mis)use of Comic Sans. That is to say, each iterative reemergence of the Comic Sans fontroversy, of which Comic CERNs is only one instance, has contributed to a widespread cultural cultivation of a negative affective stance toward the font, at least in the Anglophone world. Individuals may not be able to articulate exactly why Comic Sans evokes a negative affective experience when they see it, but they nonetheless have a framework for arguing that the font is a terrible choice. In the case of Gill Sans, nothing about the qualities of the font itself indexes negative associations, but the typeface is so closely identified with its wayward creator that some contemporary designers will argue its mere presence in the world is a tacit endorsement of his behavior. Indeed, fontroversies thrive as much on shared expressions of affective stances toward type – even if those expressions are not always commonly shared – as they do on online channels of circulation.8 Finally, fontroversies all at least implicitly center on a critique of intention and agency in crafting and ordering cultural forms. Unstated questions about choice underlie most fontroversy contributions. Why would scientists choose to represent their work in a childish font? Why would Ikea choose to switch from a respected modernist typeface to a boring Microsoft font? Why would a designer choose to use Gill Sans, knowing the details of Eric Gill’s moral transgressions? And while all of these questions concern specific fonts used in specific semiotic stratigraphies, they also all reflect a moral valence that extends beyond the cases at hand. Who gets to decide what counts as a high- or lowprestige form? What sorts of symbolic violence can companies inflict on us in our relationships with their brands, which capitalism all but demands of us? How do we negotiate – or renegotiate – emblems of collective identity, and who gets to decide if that effort is worth it? And more. This is not to argue that typeface controversies are the most critical sites of contemporary social or political struggle. But neither are they neutral or frivolous. As fontroversies unfold on various online (and offline) forums they

82

Language and Materiality

operate as sites of serious play within which users of text – professionals such as graphic designers and technical communicators, readers, and amateur fans of typography – can articulate and work through ideologies about the shape of language and other cultural forms in the everyday world through explicit metadiscursive discussion (cf. Jones and Schieffelin 2009). Moreover, in many ways these fontroversies do in fact mimic some contemporary forms of political activism, like boycotts, petitions, Twitter protests, and fierce online debate. And like many such protests they are sticky with deep affect, laminated with overlapping layers of anger, frustration, pleasure, humor, and joy. As such they represent a new and emergent space in which specific language ideologies operate in consequential ways to shape attitudes and practices around text production and reception, and in turn entangle language in broader social and even political concerns. N OT E S 1 All examples taken from Twitter, internet forums, and blog posts are presented as they were originally written, although some have been edited for length, which is indicated by bracketed ellipses. 2 While there is debate as to whether nonprint kinds of writing (e.g. calligraphic, handlettering) can be properly labeled “typographic” (Walker 2001), when I use the term here I am referring to forms derived from analog and digital printing. 3 See Drucker (2006) for a critique of the atomist view of typeface elements. 4 And CERN is in on the joke. On April Fools’ Day 2014, Fabiola Gianotti appeared in a video announcing that CERN would switch to using Comic Sans as the institute’s official font. 5 In 2014, as a result of the Comic Sans fontroversy, a new font called Comic Neue was created and freely distributed, designed to update the formal details of Comic Sans – sharpening its angles and curves mostly – in order to make it “feel” like a more highprestige font. As the creator’s website prominently proclaims, “Make your lemonade stand look like a Fortune 500 company,” a matching of forms that this new typeface presumably tolerates. See http://comicneue.com/ 6 For more on a text and affect, see Ahearn (2003); Besnier (1989, 1990); Kataoka (1997). 7 In 2012, for instance, when hundreds of child abuse allegations posthumously emerged against BBC television presenter Jimmy Savile, the Eric Gill question once again appeared in the news (e.g., Rohrer 2012). 8 This is undoubtedly related to other affective phenomena in online forums, including “flaming” (Moor et al. 2010) and “emotional contagion” (Guadagno et al. 2013), emotional responses to things that are amplified by social media circulation. REFERENCES Abend, Lisa. 2009. “The Font War: IKEA Fans Fume over Verdana.” Time Magazine, August 28, 2009. Ahearn, Laura. M. 2003. “Writing Desire in Nepali Love Letters.” Language & Communication 23(2):107–122.

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

83

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. “Happy Objects.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth, 29–51. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ˚ Akeberg, M. 2009. Nytt IKEA typsnitts val förvånar (för att inte tala om IKEA katalogen). [New IKEA typeface choice surprises (not to mention the IKEA catalog)]. [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://pleasecopyme.se/2009/08/ nytt-ikea-typsnitts-val-forvanar-for-att-inte-tala-om-ikea-katalogen/ Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. New York: Verso. Angermeyer, Phillip Sebastian. 2005. “Spelling Bilingualism: Script Choice in Russian American Classified Ads and Signage.” Language in Society 34(04):493–531. Besnier, Niko. 1989. “Literacy and Feelings: The Encoding of Affect in Nukulaelae Letters.” Text 9(1):69–91. 1990. “Language and Affect.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19:419–451. Biderman, David, and Emily Steel. 2010. LeBron and the Revenge of Comic Sans [Blog post], Wall Street Journal, July 9. Retrieved from http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/ 2010/07/09/lebron-james-and-the-revenge-of-comic-sans/ Blommaert, Jan. 2004. “Writing as a Problem: African Grassroots Writing, Economies of Literacy, and Globalization.” Language in Society 33:643–671. Byford, Sam. 2012. “CERN Scientists Inexplicably Present Higgs Boson Findings in Comic Sans.” Retrieved from www.theverge.com/2012/7/4/3136652/ cern-scientists-comic-sans-higgs-boson Cavanaugh, Jillian R., and Shalini Shankar 2014. “Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality, and Value.” American Anthropologist 116(1):51–64. Challand, S. 2009. Ikea Says Goodbye to Futura [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://idsgn .org/posts/ikea-says-goodbye-to-futura/ Childers, Terry L., and Jeffrey Jass. 2002. “All Dressed up with Something to Say: Effects of Typeface Semantic Associations on Brand Perceptions and Consumer Memory.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 12(2):93–106. Cody, Francis. 2009. “Daily Wires and Daily Blossoms: Cultivating Regimes of Circulation in Tamil India’s Newspaper Revolution.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2):286–309. Collins, James. 1995. “Literacy and Literacies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24:75– 93. Das, Sonia. N. 2011. “Rewriting the Past and Reimagining the Future: The Social Life of a Tamil Heritage Language Industry.” American Ethnologist 38(4):774–789. Daveluy, Michelle and Jenanne Ferguson. 2009. “Scripted Urbanity in the Canadian North.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(1):78–100. Doyle, John R., and Paul A. Bottomley. 2004. “Font Appropriateness and Brand Choice.” Journal of Business Research 57(8):873–880. 2006. “Dressed for the Occasion: Font-Product Congruity in the Perception of Logotype.” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 16(2):112–123. Drucker, Johanna. 2006. “Graphical Readings and the Visual Aesthetics of Textuality.” Text, 16:267–276. Duranti, Alessandro. 2011. “Linguistic Anthropology: Language as a Non-Neutral Medium.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics, edited by R. Mesthrie, 28–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Faye, Emmanuel. 2011. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. New Haven: Yale University Press.

84

Language and Materiality

Fenigsen, Janina. 1999. ““A Broke-Up Mirror”: Representing Bajan in Print.” Cultural Anthropology 14(1):61–87. Foster, Robert. J. 2007. “The Work of the New Economy: Consumers, Brands, and Value Creation.” Cultural Anthropology 22(4):707–731. Garfield, Simon. 2010. Just My Type: A Book about Fonts. New York: Gotham. Göpfert, Mirco. 2013. “Bureaucratic Aesthetics: Report Writing in the Nigérien Gendarmerie.” American Ethnologist 40(2):324–334. Graham, Laura. R. 2011. “Quoting Mario Juruna: Linguistic Imagery and the Transformation of Indigenous Voice in the Brazilian Print Press.” American Ethnologist 38(1):164–183. Guadagno, Rosanna E., Daniel M. Rempala, Shannon Murphy, and Bradley M. Okdie. 2013. “What Makes a Video Go Viral? An Analysis of Emotional Contagion and Internet Memes.” Computers in Human Behavior 29:2312–2319. Henderson, Pamela W., Joan L. Giese, and Joseph A. Cote. 2004. “Impression Management Using Typeface Design.” Journal of Marketing 68(4):60–72. Herzfeld, Michael. 2005. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Hull, Matthew. S. 2003. “The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy.” Language and Communication 23(3–4):287–314. 2008. “Ruled by Records: The Expropriation of Land and the Misappropriation of Lists in Islamabad.” American Ethnologist 35(4):501–518. Jaffe, Alexandra. 2013. “Minority Language Learning and Communicative Competence: Models of Identity and Participation in Corsican Adult Language Courses.” Language and Communication 33(4):450–462. 1996. “The Second Annual Corsican Spelling Contest: Orthography and Ideology.” American Ethnologist 23(4):816–835. Jaffe, Alexandra, J. Androutsopolous, M. Sebba, and S. Johnson, eds. 2012. Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity, and Power. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Järlehed, Johan. 2015. “Ideological Framing of Vernacular Type Choices in the Galician and Basque Semiotic Landscape.” Social Semiotics 25(2):165–199. Johnson, Sally. 2002. “On the Origin of Linguistic Norms: Orthography, Ideology and the First Constitutional Challenge to the 1996 Reform of German.” Language in Society 32:549–576. Jones, Graham. M. and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 2009. “Talking Text and Talking Back: “My BFF Jill” from Boob Tube to YouTube.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14(4):1050–1079. Kataoka, Kuniyoshi. 1997. “Affect and Letter-Writing: Unconventional Conventions in Casual Writing by Young Japanese Women.” Language in Society 26:103– 136. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language & Communication 23:409–425. Kristofferson, Sara. 2014. Design by IKEA: A Cultural History. London: Bloomsbury. Limerick, Nicholas. 2012. “Recontextualizing Ideologies about Social Difference in New York Spanish-Language Newspaper Advertising.” Language & Communication 32:312–328. Londoño, Johana. 2015. “The Latino-Ness of Type: Making Design Identities Socially Significant.” Social Semiotics 25(2):142–150.

Fontroversy! Or, How to Care about the Shape of Language

85

MacCarthy, Fiona. 1989. Eric Gill. London: Faber and Faber. MacKiewicz, Jo. 2005. “How to Use Five Letterforms to Gauge a Typeface’s Personality: A Research-Driven Method.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 35(3):291–315. Manning, Paul. 2010. “The Semiotics of Brand.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39(1):33–49. Mazzarella, William. 2003. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Meacham, Sarah. S. 2013. “Temporality and Textual Engagement in a Middle School English Language Arts Classroom.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(3):159–181. Miller, Laura. 2011. “Subversive Script and Novel Graphs in Japanese Girls’ Culture.” Language & Communication 31(1):16–26. Moor, Peter. J., A. Heuvelman, and R. Veleur. 2010. Flaming on YouTube. Computers in Human Behavior 26:1536–1546 Murphy, Keith. M. 2013. “A Cultural Geometry: Designing Political Things in Sweden.” American Ethnologist 40(1):118–131. 2015. Swedish Design: An Ethnography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Nakassis, Constantine. V. 2012. “Brand, Citationality, Performativity.” American Anthropologist 114(4):624–638. Nozawa, Shunsuke. 2007. “The Meaning of Life: Regimes of Textuality and Memory in Japanese Personal Historiography.” Language & Communication 27(2):153– 177. Pang, Laikwan. 2008. “China Who Makes and Fakes: A Semiotics of the Counterfeit.” Theory Culture & Society 25(6):117–140. Poffenberger, A. T. and R. B. Franken. 1923. “A Study of the Appropriateness of Type Faces.” Journal of Applied Psychology 7(4):312–329. Postdesk. 2011. An Interview with Vincent Connare, Creator of the Comic Sans Font on What He Thinks of It Now, Future of Typography. Retrieved from www.postdesk .com/comic-sans-creator-vincent-connaire-typography Reid, Alby. 2012. Rename the Font “Comic Sans” to “Comic Cerns” in the Windows 8 OS. [Petition post] Retrieved from www.change.org/p/microsoftrename-the-font-comic-sans-to-comic-cerns-in-the-windows-8-os Rohrer, F. 2007. “Can the Art of a Paedophile Be Celebrated?” BBC News Magazine. September 5, 2007. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/ 6979731.stm 2012. “Jimmy Savile: Erasing the Memory.” BBC News Magazine. November 1, 2012. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20165466 Romaine, Suzanne. 2002. “Signs of Identity, Signs of Discord: Glottal Goofs and the Green Grocer’s Glottal in Debates on Hawaiian Orthography.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12(2):189–224. Rothstein, Edward. 2009. “Typography Fans Say Ikea Should Stick to Furniture.” New York Times, September 4, p. C1. Rundle, Michael. 2012. Higgs Boson Discovery Announcement Made in Comic Sans. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robert-urquhart/cern-higgs-bosoncomic-sans-_b_1148058.html Scollon, Ron and Suzie Wong Scollon. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. New York: Routledge.

86

Language and Materiality

Shankar, Shalini. 2015. Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shankar, Shalini and Jillian Cavanaugh. 2012. “Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:355–369. Shoaps, Robin. 2002. ““Pray Earnestly”: The Textual Construction of Personal Involvement in Pentecostal Prayer and Song.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12(1):34–71. Silverstein, Michael. 1996. “The Secret Life of Texts.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by M. Silverstein & G. Urban, 81–105. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spitzmüller, Jürgen. 2012. “Floating Ideologies: Metamorphoses of Graphic “Germanness.”” In Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity, and Power, edited by Alexandra Jaffe, J. Androutsopoulos, M. Sebba, & S. Johnson, 255–288. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 2015. “Graphic Variation and Graphic Ideologies: A Metapragmatic Approach.” Social Semiotics 25(2):126–141. Tannenbaum, Percy H., Harvey K. Jacobson, and Eleanor L. Norris. 1964. “An Experimental Investigation of Typeface Connotations.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 41(1):65–73. Urquhart, R. 2011, December 11. CERN Higgs Boson V Comic Sans Debacle. Huffington Post UK. Retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robert-urquhart/ cern-higgs-boson-comic-sans-_b_1148058.html Vaisman, Carmel. L. 2014. “Beautiful Script, Cute Spelling and Glamorous Words: Doing Girlhood through Language Playfulness on Israeli Blogs.” Language & Communication 34:69–80. van Leeuwen, Theo. 2006. “Towards a Semiotics of Typography.” Information Design Journal and Document Design 14(2):139–155. Vit, A. 2009, August 31. Verdanagate. Brand New. Retrieved from www .underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/verdanagate.php Walker, Sue. 2001. Typography and Language in Everyday Life: Prescriptions and Practices. London: Longman. Wallén, J. 2009, August 20. Därför Byter Ikea Typsnitt till Verdana. Cap&Design. Retrieved from http://capdesign.idg.se/2.990/1.242079/darfor-byter-ikeatypsnitt-till-verdana Wertheim, Suzanne. 2012. “Reclamation, Revalorization, and Re-Tatarization via Changing Tatar Orthographies.” In Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity, and Power, edited by A. Jaffe, J. Androutsopoulos, M. Sebba, & S. Johnson, 65–101. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Wilf, Eitan. 2013. “Streamlining the Muse: Creative Agency and the Reconfiguration of Charismatic Education as Professional Training in Israeli Poetry Writing Workshops.” Ethos 41(2):127–149. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

5

Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling∗ Shalini Shankar

Competitive spelling, once a schoolroom language-unification exercise, has become a branded, mediated phenomenon in the United States. Its small-scale start with spelling primers in single-room schoolhouses grew into a national contest through print capitalism over the twentieth century. In the last two decades, spelling bees have grown into a major enterprise underwritten by corporate sponsors and mediated through broadcast and social media. While the activity of spelling remains a language arts exercise, the scale of this competition and the material cultural forms that are linked to it have grown tremendously. The “swag” or coveted branded items and other objects that materialize “The Bee” make spelling competitions into something larger than orthography alone. The competition’s circulation through broadcast and social media platforms underscores the form of words and how they take shape in the world for spellers as well as audiences. In this chapter I ethnographically explore the language materiality of spelling. In the spelling bee world, the form of words, their “sound shapes” (Jakobson 1960), and their meanings are as relevant as orthography. The materiality of words is also evidenced through documents such as word lists and the dictionary itself, in both paper and online forms. Material culture, such as items bearing the National Spelling Bee brand and objects bearing apiary imagery, allow for creative plays on the word “bee.” Such convergences of words, brands, and objects are simultaneously instances of a language ideology of standardization, semiotic mediation, and the commodification of language. Considering these aspects together, I highlight language materiality as a way to contribute to and further these academic conversations. ∗

I gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation Cultural Anthropology Program (BCS-1323769), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Northwestern University for sponsoring the research presented in this chapter. I am indebted to the Scripps Foundation, ESPN, National Spelling Bee officials and staff, spellers, and their families for granting me access to the spelling bee world. I thank Jillian Cavanaugh for her thoughtful comments on several drafts, as well as audiences at New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago for their questions and feedback on portions of this chapter. All errors are my own.

87

88

Language and Materiality

In this volume, as well as elsewhere (see Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014; Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012), Jillian Cavanaugh and I have attended to convergences of the linguistic and the material, arguing that form is as important as the referential and indexical content of words and utterances and is also tied to political economy. In my corpus of research, I have examined these convergences with regard to advertising development and production, in which aspects of culture and language are selectively used to construct semiotic assemblages that convey brand identity (Shankar 2012, 2013, 2015). I have also theorized the relationship between talk and things, and how objectifications circulate through talk about valued objects, complicating notions of ownership and status (Shankar 2006, 2008). Here I see language materiality as a way to understand the ways young people create distinctive relationships with words, how words are objectified for visual consumption, and the material culture that shapes these activities and brands them for circulation. In what follows I offer a brief overview of spelling competitions and their transformation during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the rise of the dictionary brand Merriam-Webster and its concomitant authority in this realm. I then turn to the material qualities of language in spelling competitions, including the form of words as they are shaped and transformed by etymology, especially those that move through several languages before coming into American English. I also consider the materiality of letters and words as they are objectified for study through documents and for media consumption via screens. The latter part of the chapter explores material objectifications of competitive spelling, including bee-themed words, practices, and objects. I conclude with a discussion of spelling bees and their relationship to and beyond language commodification. The Rise of Competitive Spelling Spelling bees initially began as classroom competitions in the service of standardizing American English in a post-independence United States. Early accounts of spelling contests appear in nineteenth-century American literature, as do spelling reform associations and elementary primers used to accomplish this goal. These classroom exercises were as much focused on uniformity of pronunciation as they were on orthographic consistency, both in the service of establishing the authority of American English. Like other contests involving orthography (Jaffe 1996; Johnson 2005; Schieffelin and Doucet 1994; Sebba 2007), these spelling competitions were intended to create a standard that differed substantially from British and other Commonwealth varieties of English. Some in-class contests grew into school and regional ones, and newspapers began to sponsor local bees during the twentieth century. The first national spelling bee, which was held in Washington, DC in 1925, was collaboratively

Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling

89

sponsored by nine newspapers. Newspaper and communications giant E. W. Scripps assumed sponsorship of the competition in 1941. Apart from the years 1943–1945, when the bee was suspended for World War II, it has been held every year since and covered by newspapers, radio, television, and social media. Spelling bees remain, first and foremost, an educational activity, but much has changed in the way they are conducted, promoted, and mediated. Newspaper coverage, through print and online readerships, remains the primary means of reporting on regional competitors who are sponsored by particular newspapers. These outlets generally cover the progress of their sponsored contestant through the early rounds of the competition. The finals were first live broadcasted for television in 1946 on NBC. They were not broadcasted again until 1974, when PBS aired a taped primetime special that year and again in 1977. Since 1994, the national finals have been broadcast every year. From 1994–2005, ESPN offered a live, daytime broadcast and shifted to a primetime broadcast from 2011 onward. In the interim years of 2006–2010, ABC broadcast the national finals. For the past twenty years, these live prime-time broadcasts of spelling bees, especially the multiday coverage of the National Spelling Bee on ESPN and additional coverage via Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media platforms, have increased the visibility of the bee and its spellers by creating featured profiles of spellers, interviews during competition, and a visual representation of words in the competition, as I discuss later. Current sponsorship models and broadcast platforms have elevated spelling bees into mass-mediated, sportlike events that call for new levels of professionalization from children. Children learn to become “elite spellers” by devoting multiple years and countless hours to train for and participate in spelling competitions. They cultivate what they call “spelling careers” from age six to age fourteen, after which they “age out” and move on to other pursuits (Shankar 2018). Language materiality is a lens through which to understand the objectification and circulation of this activity across a range of mediated contexts. For instance, spellers negotiate this complex activity through intersections of sound and Peircean “firstness,” and embodied knowledge, and do so in the allotted two minutes of their spelling bee turn (Shankar 2016). Here I am interested in considering the contributions of this competition to processes of language standardization and the commodification of American English worldwide – a discussion to which I return in my conclusion. The ethnographic examples I present are drawn from fieldwork conducted during portions of “bee season” (January–August) each year from 2012–2016. I observed spelling competitions and spellers onstage, their off-stage interaction with one another in person and on social media, and their interaction with their families. I interviewed spellers, their families, organizers, judges, word pronouncers, media broadcasters, production crew members, and journalists who covered the bees. I also spoke at length with lexicographers at Merriam-Webster and officials at the Scripps

90

Language and Materiality

Foundation and shadowed ESPN directors, producers, and on-air talent. All this research has shown me the importance of the materiality of words and letters, to which I now turn. Materialization of Letters and Words The ideology of language standardization that underpins the National Spelling Bee (NSB) has long been linked to American nation-building. This contest can be traced also to the promotion of a particular dictionary brand through print capitalism. The publishing company Merriam printed its first dictionary in 1847, based on Noah Webster’s 1841 edition of his dictionary of American English. Webster had previously created and circulated multiple dictionaries himself, the first in 1806. The 1841 tome bought by Merriam is considered to be Webster’s most seminal work and was the culmination of decades of his labor. As a lexicographer, Webster sought to authoritatively establish his word list of American English. As publishers, Merriam aimed to make their dictionaries household objects. This happy confluence of language standardization and print capitalism led to the growth and popularity of Merriam-Webster’s brand and product line. As an early form of language commodification, well before the current concerns of global capitalism, the Merriam-Webster brand had a quite impressive reach and authority. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the company issued numerous editions and versions of this volume ranging in size, including pocket-sized and desk-sized dictionaries, with the goal of greater affordability and sales. Only one, however, remains the final arbiter at the National Spelling Bee: available in print and online, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is the official dictionary of the National Spelling Bee. Alternate spellings found in other sources that do not appear in Webster’s Third are not accepted in this contest. When spellers win their regional competition and advance to Scripps, their sponsoring newspaper is required to purchase a copy of this volume for them. Elite spellers, those who take a career-like approach to this activity and make it to the national competition multiple times, often accumulate several copies of this dictionary. Photos of spellers on social media such as Facebook show them leaning on or standing beside stacks of this large dictionary, signaling their success of having made it to nationals multiple times. Younger children often require adult assistance to carry the volume, which weighs 12.5 pounds. More concerning than its size, however, is its scope. To win the National Spelling Bee, most spellers and parents agree that the dictionary is the only complete list of words. “The syllabus is the entire dictionary,” declared one elite speller who had consistently made it to the finals and finished in the top five. How does anyone cycle through the 2,662 pages and learn the over halfmillion words it contains? It should be noted that many spellers, even those

Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling

91

who make it to nationals, do not set their goal on becoming champion. Rather, they aim to complete a particular round of competition, such as Round 3 or the semifinals. Regardless of their goal, elite spellers develop linguistic and material strategies to manage this gargantuan document. Like other contexts in which select forms of language are materialized into print form in ways that contribute to the construction of standards that engender other social values (Cavanaugh 2016; Cody 2009; Hull 2012; Jaffe 1996), spelling words become materialized into documents that form the basis for daily study. The materiality of spelling is primarily about the letters themselves. Including letters that should be omitted or omitting those that should be included can make or break a speller in any given competition. A major part of preparing for the National Spelling Bee is learning the form of words and their etymological route to American English. Through their knowledge of etymology, spellers can break down and rebuild, onstage, words that they may not know how to spell or confirm those that they do. No speller I met simply tried to keep all the words in their mind. Rather, managing this lexical inventory called for tangible methods. Many begin with the “School Spelling Bee Study List” distributed by their schools. Hard copies of word lists are sorted by grade level and distributed by participating schools. Once spellers master the words for their grade level, they move on to Merriam-Webster’s “Spell It” words, containing about 1,200 words. Students may download this list from the Merriam-Webster website or receive it from their schools. One form of the hard-copy version is as an oversized list that folds out like a map, which spellers can use and manipulate in a number of ways. In addition to being hung on a wall, it can be marked up, circled, and diagrammed, and it forms the source material for numerous other written practices that aid in spelling preparation. These include index cards of R notes placed throughout spellers’ homes on bathroom etymologies and Post-it mirrors, inside closets, and on any surface toward which they may glance, to help them learn words according to language of origin, part of speech, and other features. Other techniques for creating lists and documents vary, in gradations of difficulty, from languages of origin to suffixes and prefixes. One fifteen-year old boy who had “aged out” of his spelling career admitted that the “root trees” his mother had drawn for him for Latin, Greek, German, Old English, and other languages still hung on his bedroom wall, even though his competition days had ended. “I guess I still look at them,” he shrugged, seemingly having formed a bond with them after having looked intently at them for years. Although he had learned the trees early on in his preparation, their materiality offered tangible evidence of his relationship with language in this form. Finding ways to retain this vast lexical knowledge is an ongoing challenge. One ten-year-old girl told a television interviewer, “My dad has an easy and hard word binder, with a lot of info on each page. I have a board by my desk, I write certain words on them

92

Language and Materiality

and I see it in the AM and the word sticks in my head more.” As the interviewer nodded, the speller added, as if more to herself than the camera, “I need to internalize the word.” Such intimate connections with words and language illustrate how spellers create connections with words in their material forms to perform them orally. Elite spellers wrestle with Webster’s Third and approach it in a variety of ways. Spellers work with parents, or sometimes other adults such as teachers or hired coaches, to develop ways to materially manage the dictionary. Some prefer the online version, which allows them to search by language of origin, prefixes and suffixes, and other classifications. Others opt to work with the physical book, apportioning sections according to study-based skill level and available study time. Usually spellers create a combination of physical and digital approaches for different aspects of the preparation process. For instance, some reported it simpler to study root words through the searchable online dictionary, because it enabled them to more clearly understand patterns for spelling in different languages. Others valued physically turning pages and reading each column of the dictionary in order to avoid missing any words through online searches. Although any word in this dictionary could appear in any round, seasoned spellers have developed a sense, through trial and error and with the help of other spellers, of which words may appear when. One speller and his father explained to me that together they created a short list of about 120,000 words from Webster’s Third. Arguably a speculative endeavor, these seasoned participants felt confident in their understanding of how certain words are selected for the bee. Some words simply seemed “interesting,” whereas others could be humorously used in a sentence during the televised competition. This family, like others with champion spellers, created its own database and interactive computer program to aid in learning words for competition. This is helpful because the winning words are rarely found in everyday conversation or written use. Six of the last eight winning words appear as misspellings in Microsoft Word (stromuhr, cymotrichous, guetapens, knaidel, scherenschnitte, and nunatak). The remaining two, feuilleton and stichomythia, are encountered with similar infrequency. As parents and spellers I spoke with attested, the sheer volume of words and the need to keep knowledge about them current were two of the most commonly reported challenges to preparing for this contest. Elite spellers explained to me and to journalists who interviewed them that they see the world as a tableau of words. Experiencing language materially, elite spellers attest that they see words everywhere and interact with them substantively, perhaps more than does the average viewer of a billboard or a public sign. Visually encountering spelling words in the world helps spellers develop indexical relationships with words based on how and when they encounter them, as well as iconic ones that allow them to link words with forms that resemble them. Spellers remain

Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling

93

vigilant about words they think will be helpful, whether they are reading books for school or see them while traveling with their families. One speller put it like this: “If I open my eyes and look around, I may see words.” She reflected on how she was fortunate enough to take a family trip to Germany and encountered menu items that she added to her word study and later heard in the final round of a regional spelling bee. Even as spellers and the adults who help them study encounter hundreds of thousands of words, only some of them will appear in competition. The list of words appearing in the national competition in any given year is carefully limited to as few people as possible. These include the elusive members of the committee that creates the word lists, as well as the elite few who are given the list in advance of the competition. Scripps is decidedly secretive about the word committee or the individuals who select words for the national competition and group them according to difficulty. What is known is that this group includes lexicographers from Merriam-Webster, pronouncer and former champion Dr. Jacques Bailly, and some of the judges. Easier to discover are the people who receive the list ahead of the competition. Judges and pronouncers are given the lists so they can familiarize themselves with the words before the competition. When I spoke to ESPN producers and visited their “truck” or mobile station docked in the back of the convention center, I was able to see firsthand the material transformation of words into images. These two trailers were packed with media broadcasting equipment and computer servers. The live ESPN broadcast is edited and produced from this truck. “We load the words in advance,” one producer told me as he graciously offered me a tour of the cramped facility full of people intently managing broadcast content on their screens. He explained that the words and their definitions had to be loaded and formatted at least a week in advance of the bee to ensure that everything functioned properly during the live broadcast. Likewise, the social media team that live tweets every word spelled in the competition is given the list to ensure accuracy. In the three years I sat next to the social media team, two former champions furiously typed the speller’s name and number, along with the word received, and whether or not they spelled it correctly. Such objectifications of competition words – into graphics for television and tweets for social media consumption – enable words to circulate materially beyond their context of utterance in a spelling bee turn. As I now discuss, the form of words themselves (see also Murphy, Chapter 4, this volume) is linked to this objectification while it also mediates how spellers connect with specific words and etymology more generally. Materiality of Form and Meaning The form of words, as well as their meanings, is of central importance to spellers and officials alike. How a word sounds, its spelling as influenced by

94

Language and Materiality

its language(s) of origin, and why it may be memorable are features that matter greatly in the spelling bee world. In his writings on the poetics of language, Roman Jakobson has described the “sound shape” of language as mattering in terms of how people experience it. Considering the materiality of sound in relation to words is evident in poetry and literary devices such as alliteration. This language materiality is also evident in spelling. Much of what makes a word challenging is how closely its sound matches its form. More than 50 percent of the words in the bee come from Latin, New Latin, Middle English, or French. Whether a word is spelled with a “c” or a “k,” which can produce the same sound in pronunciation, may be influenced by whether it comes from Latin. French words that are now part of English may contain numerous silent letters. One of the most dramatic illustrations of the importance of form in the spelling bee world emerged from a tweet during the finals of the 2016 National Spelling Bee. Kyle Chapman, @kchapman_88, tweeted the following message about the “comfort couch,” a small seating area to the left of the stage, where spellers wait until their parents traverse the massive ballroom to escort them back to the audience: “Unsure of why the national spelling bee has a “comfort couch” you fucking lost suck it up quit teaching kids it’s okay to loose @ScrippsBee”. The tweet clearly has the negative tone of an internet “troll” or someone who directly or anonymously offers insulting or profane remarks. @kchapman_88 makes multiple grammatical and syntactical errors, though these are quite common given the 140-character limit of Twitter. His meaning, however, seems to be different from the form of his utterance: he tweets “quit teaching kids it’s okay to loose,” perhaps intending to state the opposite. @ScrippsBee focused on something quite different and responded quite tersely: “@kchapman_88 ∗ lose”. In his directive to Scripps, the tweeter clearly meant to type the word “lose,” not “loose.” The reply, however, brilliantly showcased the importance of form and orthographic accuracy that characterize professional spelling, regardless of the length or definition of the word. Here the tweeter’s meaning was clear, but the form proved to be his undoing. The tweet went viral, and @kchapman_88 temporarily shut down his account, only to reinstate it and alter his bio to “catch me on CNN.” The exchange was widely covered by a number of media outlets, all of which declared it a decisive victory for @ScrippsBee. While such a simple mistake is highly unlikely onstage, some vowel sounds can be confounding to spellers. Most agree that the most vexing sound to match to letters is the schwa. From German via Hebrew, this single sound can be spelled quite differently, making this a very challenging sound shape to match to letters. In a lecture about the dictionary that I attended during the 2014 spelling bee, lexicographer Peter Sokolowski noted how this sound often trips up the most experienced spellers. He likened the difficulty of spelling this

Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling

95

sound to a once popular song and delivered the line, “I fought the schwa and the schwa won” (in which “schwa” is substituted for “law”). The lyric elicited much laughter and nodding from the audience of spellers and their families. Words that contain schwa sounds are among those that spellers identify as “good words.” As several spellers explained it to me, good words are those not commonly found in common conversation, but that could be worked into everyday speech with a little creativity; they have an unexpected spelling that may or may not conform to its root language; and they have a “good” definition. Good definitions include terms from the life sciences, politics, and bureaucracy and anything else that has a “cool definition,” as one speller suggested. Because of their form as well as their content, good words are highly valued and widely discussed in the spelling bee world. Spellers post to their social media pages about words they discovered, in hopes that others might share insights and excitement about the word. They also try to incorporate good words into everyday conversation, which is no small feat, given their esoteric character. Elite spellers also have a favorite word that they readily share, define, and spell if asked – a common gambit for interviewers trying to get otherwise reticent children to open up for the camera. Some appreciate the resemblance in form between words and their own names. This was the case for 2015 National Spelling Bee cochampion Gokul Venketachalam, whose first name refers to the birthplace of the Hindu god Krishna. His favorite word is “jokul,” a Scandinavian word for an ice glacier that is also a popular boy’s name in Iceland. Several spellers loved the long-named Hawaiian fish, the humuhumunukunukuapua’a, for its length and pleasing sound shape, despite its phonetic spelling. Spellers report that winning and losing words are extremely memorable. Elite spellers know which words eliminated their fellow competitors in the same way that baseball aficionados can recite stats for numerous players, teams, and years. They reference these words in conversation with one another in empathy and solidarity. Some memorialize the words they misspell in competition; one shared her cryptic Skype address “hallalisylloge,” which she told me were the two words that eliminated her from the 2012 and 2013 NSB, respectively: “hallali” and “sylloge.” Winning words are found in the official Scripps publications, including each year’s guide, as well as on banners featuring champions. The latter are hung from banners in the Gaylord National Resort in National Harbor, MD, outside Washington, DC, where the National Spelling Bee takes place each year. Some words continue beyond the bee to have a media life of their own. For instance, when 2013 winner, eleven-yearold Arvind Mahankali, correctly spelled the Yiddish word “knaidel” (a type of matzoh ball), he not only won but also as part of his publicity tour was filmed eating a knaidel at a New York City Jewish delicatessen. These materializations of language and the objectification of words are central ways in which elite spellers remain immersed in lexicography for their childhood years, both during and outside of competition.

96

Language and Materiality

Image 5.1 Objectifying words for ESPN speller profile segments

Another genre demonstrating the prevalence of sound and form in the spelling bee world is puns. Many spellers love to pun as part of their love of language and word play. In one interview I conducted via Skype with two spellers I had met at the 2013 and 2014 bees, the two girls, who had become close friends, told me about their Instagram site. For their own entertainment and for their followers, they engaged in a variety of lexical play. One explained to me that wordplay was far more challenging each “satireday” (Saturday) versus “punday” (Sunday), the latter of which was an easy and natural activity because they already engaged in so many spelling-related puns. Puns, favorite words, and good words take on qualities beyond their contexts of utterance when mediated for television. In addition to routinely sharing their favorite words with reporters, elite spellers might also have a chance to materially objectify and interact with a word they favor for television. In many of the speller profiles I watched ESPN create for on-air broadcast, words were a major part of the segments. Producers set up oversized Scrabble-style letter tiles of spellers’ favorite words on a flat surface and asked spellers to knock them down like dominoes as they spell them (see Image 5.1). “Don’t be afraid to really push them down,” encouraged one production assistant, when spellers seemed tentative about getting rough with their word. Even the rules of the spelling bee are made into attractive placards that spellers hold up and sometimes play with, rather than simply saying them.

Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling

97

The play-along competition is also available for viewers during early rounds of competition, viewable on ESPN 3 and WatchESPN. Here, the producers have created three incorrect versions of the word as choices alongside the correct ones. This multiple-choice format offers different material instantiations of the spoken word, showing them on screen for home viewers to have a one-in-four chance of selecting the correct word. Enhanced from an earlier version with only three choices, the screen content also now includes informational boxes highlighting the word’s etymology, definition, and part of speech. Although none of these graphics are visible to the live audience in the large ballroom in which the spelling bee is held, there are screens with graphics and other visuals in the room. The competition is staged on a large stage flanked by two large screens, on which the word only appears after a speller has completed his or her turn. The materiality of words is here demonstrated as well through the movement of bees and their linkages with actual words. Words take on anthropomorphic qualities, swirling in air with letters jumbling and re-forming at will. At the 2013 NSB, words shot across the screen in a filmed homage to the musical Matilda whose narrative was rewritten to capture the tough conditions of spelling competitions. “The word is here to destroy you. At the mic you have no friends,” sang a sinister voice. In other visual segments that punctuated the actual competition, letters bounced off landmark Washington, DC buildings, materializing the presence of this language competition in the nation’s capital. The materialization of words, letters, and language itself is evident in these graphical representations and in the ways spellers and others engage with them. Form remains important, whether in the material representation of words or their objectification through mediation. These modalities create a basis on which to link language to brand, in ways that illustrate the materiality of competitive spelling. Objectifications of Spelling and Brand Of the many instances of language materiality evident in competitive spelling, one of the most pervasive is the homonym “bee.” The precise definition of “bee” here is not agreed on, though some argue that it refers to people coming together to participate vigorously in a common activity and help each other work toward a shared goal. Others extend this analogy to individuals collaborating like bees working busily in a hive. The visual, material, and linguistic use of “bee” is realized through several modalities, in each of which language and materiality are intertwined. This strategy pervades the days surrounding the bee, which Scripps has named “Bee Week.” Spellers arrive on Sunday to enjoy a barbeque on Monday and take a written test on Tuesday before beginning live competition on Wednesday and Thursday, concluded by a Friday field trip,

98

Language and Materiality

awards banquet, and dance party. Having attended several Bee Weeks in part or full for this research project, I have been struck by the energy and totality of the bee experience, from the material culture featuring bees to the neologisms that are commonplace in this world. For instance, Bee Week 2014 began with small groups of spellers reuniting or meeting each other anew, taking “spellfies” in commemoration. “Spellfie” is a spelling bee word play on “selfie” or a selfphoto taken with one’s mobile phone or tablet. Spellfies began appearing on Twitter, spellers’ Facebook pages, on blogs, and in the regional media outlets that sponsored children and their families to travel to Washington, DC to attend the bee. Employing another neologism, “spellpeaters” or returning competitors were identified during the opening assembly. All spellers present were spiritedly asked, “Did you bring your bee game?” a play on the commonly asked sports question about whether a player brought their “A game.” In recent years, Scripps has distributed numerous items to materialize and make tangible the otherwise cerebral and aural process of spelling. Visually, it has made ample use of the bee motif, issuing differently stylized versions of the insect as logos for the contest (see Image 5.2). In some years the bee has looked more round and animated, with a cartoon-like face and eyes, whereas in others it is a more abstract graphic representation with antennae, head, wings, and a fused head and thorax. This graphic is featured on all of their promotional materials, including the program booklet, nametags, and the “swag” created for that year. In the spelling bee world, swag refers to promotional items, an updated definition for the word that refers to stolen goods. Spelling bee swag is generously distributed to spellers and their families and tends to feature trademarked apiary designs. T-shirts in recent years have read “Buzzworthy,” “Spellebrity,” and the tandem speller-family member shirts, “Spelled It” and “Wanna Bee.” Scripps also distributes sunglasses, watches, and other items with their distinctive black, white, and yellow bee designs. Perhaps the most ubiquitous item among spellers is the “bee keeper,” a small, thick, glossy spiral-bound book containing photos and bios of all the spellers, NSB officials, and staff. With the “bee keeper” serving as a keepsake and acting as an icebreaker, bee officials urge spellers to fill them with signatures of fellow participants, challenging them to capture as many as possible. Embracing the bee as an insect theme during competition, spellers display their collection of apiary material culture, including bags, cufflinks, and jewelry. Some have their nails painted in bee colors, and others have acrylic nails painted with pictures of bees. Even the dessert at the final banquet each year includes a white chocolate medallion with the bee logo. Television coverage furthers bee culture through a collection of on-air graphics that include a cartoon bee (added in postproduction) that buzzes around spellers’ heads with challenging words, a swarm of bees moving across the

Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling

99

Image 5.2 National Spelling Bee logo and honeycomb stage design

screen as it goes black during transitions to commercials, and honeycomb graphics framing spellers and lexical information. The set on which the event is staged features a honeycomb pattern (see Image 5.2). Whereas the stage used to have a white background with the recurring pattern of the Scripps name and lighthouse logo, it now features a giant honeycomb that includes pleasing shades of turquoise, violet, lavender, and yellow during announcements and interviews. The color of the lighting changes dramatically during competition,

100

Language and Materiality

from a calm blue to a dramatic orange and red as the clock winds down and spellers approach their time limit. In these material and linguistic actualizations of the bee, the creation and promotion of brand are evident – not only the Scripps brand but also a brand identity for this language arts exercise, more broadly. Promoting the bee through apiary themes and creating neologisms that suggest a unique experience for participants, Scripps objectifies spelling for circulation and consumption. As I conclude this chapter, I consider how competitive spelling offers evidence of language commodification, but also complicate this analytical frame with an explicit focus on language materiality. Conclusion Recent attention to language commodification has shown how languages and lexical elements are used to further various capitalist projects (Duchêne and Heller 2012; Heller, this volume). Evidence of language commodification can be seen in the rise in popularity of spelling bees. This is attributable to the increased sophistication of media broadcasts, as well as the active pairing of spelling to commercial interests and franchising opportunities, both of which are reinventing the popularity of American English with young people in numerous locations in the world. Commodification is especially evident in the increased variety of kinds of sponsorship now tied to the National Spelling Bee in response to the decline of the newspaper industry. Whereas newspapers were once the sole source of monies to send spellers to Washington, DC, as this industry has struggled financially, other corporations have stepped forward as sponsors. Such flexibility on the part of Scripps allows children who would not otherwise have the means to go to nationals a way to participate in Bee Week and the competition; it also opens the door to other major corporations. In past years the bee has partnered with Microsoft and spellers have received Surface tablets; more recently, it has partnered with Amazon and they have received Kindles. In these and other ways, this language-unification activity has become a major brand-promotion platform. The materiality of brand and its overt pairing with language have become the norm for this competition. While language materiality and brand contribute to commodification, objectification here seems to offer a complex range of meanings. Rather than signaling alienation, it seems to help shape relationships to language for spellers and the millions who view this televised event. The materiality of spelling is, at its heart, about how and why children develop relationships with one particular dictionary brand, how they create their own material ways of engaging with documents, and how they immerse themselves in a lexical world. Spelling matters to young people, and it gets objectified and circulated as a modern activity,

Spelling Materiality: The Branded Business of Competitive Spelling

101

rather than a relic of a centuries-old language-standardization exercise. To be sure, the ongoing project of language standardization carried out through this activity indicates the complex politics of reinforcing one variety over others, especially in such a visibly mediated way. Nonetheless, the visual and material culture of the National Spelling Bee, the attention to form and meaning, and the materiality of words make this event immanently attractive to spellers and audiences. Competitive spelling’s incorporation of material culture, brand, and circulation into language arts epitomizes what it means to perform etymology for live television and illustrate why this matters for young people. REFERENCES Brenneis, Donald. 2006. “Reforming Promise.” In Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, edited by A. Riles, 41–70. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cavanaugh, Jillian. 2016. “Talk as Work: Economic Sociability in Northern Italian Heritage Food Production.” Language & Communication 48:41–52. Cavanaugh, Jillian and Shalini Shankar. 2014. “Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Materiality, Language, and Value.” American Anthropologist 116(1):1–14. Cody, Francis. 2009. “Daily Wires and Daily Blossoms: Cultivating Regimes of Circulation in Tamil India’s Newspaper Revolution.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2):286–309. Duchêne, Alexandre and Monica Heller. 2012. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit. New York: Routledge. Hull, Matthew. 2012. “Documents and Bureaucracy.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41. Jaffe, Alexandra. 1996. “The Second Annual Corsican Spelling Contest: Orthography and Ideology.” American Ethnologist 23(4):816–835. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by T Sebeok, 350–359. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, Sally. 2005. Spelling Trouble: Language, Ideology and the Reform of German Orthography. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Schieffelin, Bambi B. and Rachelle Doucet. 1994. “The “Real” Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics, and Orthographic Choice.” American Ethnologist 21(1):176– 200. Sebba, Mark. 2007. Spelling and Society: The Culture and Politics of Orthography around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shankar, Shalini. 2018. Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal about Generation Z’s New Path to Success. New York: Basic Books. 2016. Coming in First: Sound and Embodiment in Spelling Bees. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2):119–140. 2015. Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2013. “Racial Naturalization, Advertising, and Model Consumers for a New Millennium.” Journal of Asian American Studies 16(2):159–188. 2012. “Creating Model Consumers: Producing Ethnicity, Race, and Class in Asian American Advertising. American Ethnologist 39(3):578–591.”

102

Language and Materiality

2008. Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2006. “Metaconsumptive Practices and the Circulation of Objectifications.” Journal of Material Culture 11(3):293–317. Shankar, Shalini and Jillian R. Cavanaugh. 2012. “Language Materiality in Global Capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:355–36.

Part II

Transformation, Aesthetics, Embodiment

6

How the Sausage Gets Made: Food Safety and the Mediality of Talk, Documents, and Food Practices Jillian R. Cavanaugh

The increasingly complex nature of our contemporary global food system has been a focal point of concern within the public sphere as well as for scholarship, much of it centered on the management of food safety and risk. National and international regulatory systems have been developed around food production to address these concerns through their dual focus on the quality of goods and their production processes, and the traceability of products and the primary materials of which they are composed. These systems, designed to make foods knowable and predictable – in a word, safe – no matter how far they travel, are built on documentation and verbal interaction among food producers and various interlocutors, such that both talk and documents are increasingly integral to food production and consumers’ engagement with it. Indeed, a number of current food activist movements, such as fair trade, local food, and GMO labeling, are built on making foods more knowable and trackable via documentation and various types of interactional contexts, such as farmers markets. That these systems sometimes fail to produce safe food draws attention not only to systemic ruptures, embodied in sick customers or recalled products, but also to semiotic misalignments across these modalities of production. In this chapter, I look at just such a moment of misalignment and potential rupture to show how intertwined the linguistic and the material are in food – and, I suspect, other types of – production. Specifically, I analyze an ethnographic case in which a company that makes sausages, salamis, and other meat products in northern Italy responded to the detection of a miniscule amount of Listeria, a potentially deadly bacterium,1 during a routine government inspection in summer 2012. Responses included immediate and strident protests by the company regarding the validity of the test results, a legal case against the provincial government agency whose representative allegedly found the Listeria, and company-internal efforts to enhance safeguards in the production of their cured products, an especially ripe site for bacteria growth. Although the owners of the company steadfastly maintained that there was never any health risk to consumers (and, indeed, no Listeria was ever detected in their finished products), this event set the stage for a struggle over how to define, achieve, and 105

106

Language and Materiality

ensure food safety during another inspection in spring 2013, which I attended and focus on here. Participants in this inspection turned to different aspects of production to define and fix “il problema della listeria” (the Listeria problem), as some of them labeled it. For some, food practices told the definitive story, as the company has continued to make safe, good-quality products according to its already high safety standards. For others, correct and expanded documentation was essential to ensuring the products’ safety, while for still others the verbal interactions that accompany and surround food practices were central: inspectors, clients, and workers all needed to be talked to in the right way, because strong social relationships – achieved through talk – are the best guarantee that production will flow as it should from start to finish (see Cavanaugh 2016b for more on this). In emphasizing these different elements, these various actors seemed to regard food-related, documentary, and verbal processes as separate, if connected, types of labor, and to value the importance of one or two over the other(s). This is not to say that those who prioritized documentation, for instance, did not also value food practices. Nonetheless, during the inspection, food practices, talk, and documentation each seemed to tell a slightly different story about what “the problem” was, how and if it should be addressed, and what its potential impacts might be, thereby producing misalignments across these modalities that problematize the seemingly straightforward nature of food safety. Food practices, talk, and documents are produced and encountered by specific actors within particular contexts of use, such that each has its own mediality, the “set of characterizing qualities and conditions” (Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume) that enable them to be undertaken in certain ways and support particular types of connections among actors, objects, and contexts. Thinking in terms of mediality pushes the material qualities of each to the fore: talk has pitch, volume, and pauses, but does not persist beyond its utterance; food practices produce edible goods that are encountered via the senses and digestive tracks, enduring until they are eaten, thrown out, or rot; documents, as hard copies or electronic files, are encountered through hands and eyes and may exist far longer than either of the other two, when stored in files, boxes, or hard drives. As such, this is a case of language materiality, because the material forms of language matter, the linguistic and the material are irrevocably interconnected, and the linguistic produces material effects. As each modality not only depicted but also helped instantiate a certain version of the problem and its solution, I view them as performative. Performativity has long been central to inquiries into how language in particular “does something in the world”(see Moore, Chapter 11, this volume). From Austin’s (1962) early explication of performative acts as effecting change in the

How the Sausage Gets Made

107

world, to Butler’s (1990) use of performativity to capture processes of subject formation, performative language has been seen as activity that brings about change in the world, rather than simply reflecting or describing it (see also Cameron 1997; Kulick 1993). Performativity is useful for my purposes here precisely because it is a semiotic process, which may function across expressive modalities and have a range of effects on the world, on subjects, and on the values and meanings they produce. In this case of language materiality, food practices, talk, and documentation are active and reflective processes that produce distinctive effects and have an impact on one another, creating moments of alignment and conflict between and among these modalities that are characteristic of contemporary capitalist production. Once upon a time, perhaps, material skills and production procedures – what I call here food practices – were what mattered most to making a safe, highquality product; talk supported the circulation of such products within face-toface interactions, whereas documents were limited to a few narrow domains, such as inventories or licenses. Increasingly, however, governmental and other regulatory institutions prioritize documentation as the means to ensure food safety (Dunn 2007) – a documentary regime grounded in inspection events, such as the one I analyze here. Food producers of all sorts must be able to make good food, but they also need to have the skills to produce and abide by various modes of documentation, and they must master verbal skills to interact with customers, as well as those who represent and enforce various documentary regimes. Producers who refuse or are ill equipped to embrace these emerging requisites do so at their own peril, risking the loss of production permits or long-term contracts with clients, or being shut down altogether. Approaching language materially, as well as treating these three labor modalities as equally involved in food production, helps illustrate the complex nature of contemporary food production; keeping an eye on the medialities of each helps us understand not only how they relate to one another but also why conflicts such as the one I lay out here are built into this system, not departures from it. I turn now to sketch some of the background of this case, including the company and participants in the inspection, and my own research methods before exploring the performativity of food practices, talk, and documents in the context of this inspection. Making the Sausage (and Salami) The Rotelli family company has been making fresh and aged meat products for roughly thirty years.2 These days, it employs about seventy employees and makes everything from sausages and salamis to packaged meatballs. Since 2000, its work has included committing to particular international production

108

Language and Materiality

standards (ISO 14001 and 9001),3 which necessitated hiring a part-time specialist who could deal with the expanded documentation and intensive yearly inspections that adhering to those standards entails. Like all the companies with whom I work, they are also subject to periodic inspections by representatives of ASL (Azienda Sanitaria Locale, or Local Health Unit, a governmental organization), which include – in addition to the physical inspection of facilities – swabs taken at various locations that are then sent to labs for testing for particular pathogens, observations of food practices and storage areas, and review of documents.4 It was one of these routine ASL inspections in summer 2012 that led to the so-called Listeria problem: a swab taken at a water source not directly involved in food practices (a hookup for a hose used in cleaning the production room) tested positive in the lab for a miniscule amount of Listeria, a finding that was not replicated in any other swabs taken that day. Given that the amount found was under the legal amount permitted by the European Union (see footnote 1), that it was not found in any food or food-related equipment, and that subsequent swabs across the facility were negative, the company was under no obligation to alter or stop production. To protect their image and reputation, however, the company sought to have this finding expunged from its inspection record by legally contesting the finding, arguing that, because Listeria is a common, naturally occurring organism (Tompkin 2002), it could have been introduced to the sample after testing, perhaps in the lab itself. In fall 2012, the company also decided to undertake a comprehensive review of its aging practices for its cured meat products, which, as mentioned earlier, are ripe sites for Listeria growth if not handled scrupulously.5 The inspection discussed here took place over two days in April 2013; its function was to maintain the status of the company as adhering to ISO 14001 and 9001 quality and environmental standards. Certifications such as these are designed to align company practices with international standards and ensure product safety and regularity. Although governmental agencies like ASL have their own growing sphere of inspection, documentation, and certification with which companies must per force engage in order to operate legally, an increasing number of companies – from those that produce foods to those that make the containers foods are packaged in – have embraced these international standards. The rise of for-profit nongovernmental international organizations that engage in this type of certification and standards assessment activity indicates their growing importance within global capitalism, as, for instance, Megan Tracy’s (2013) work with an agency certifying milk production in China has shown. Though adherence to these standards is costly and time consuming, companies undertake these voluntary commitments of time, resources, and personnel in order to gain access to new clients and markets, and, increasingly, ensure

How the Sausage Gets Made

109

the loyalty of existing clients. These days, larger clients, such as supermarket chains, insist on this type of certification. This inspection involved a number of participants, but I focus here primarily on three: Valeria, the company’s documents specialist; Matteo, the inspector; and Giacomo, the CEO and manager of the company and also a co-owner (he is one of the brothers in the company’s name). Valeria was in her late thirties and had worked part-time as a consultant for the company for several years, in addition to doing inspections at other, similar companies. She and Matteo, in his mid-fifties, have known each other for years as their paths have crossed at events like this multiple times. Both have college degrees in their field, as well as the light or nonexistent regional accents that signal extensive higher education and white-collar work in Italy. Giacomo, in his seventies, still effectively runs the company, although he is officially retired, a status he shares with his brothers, which causes grumbling among their sons, nearly all of whom work at the company. Like his brothers and most of their sons, and the majority of the employees I have encountered at this company and others like it, Giacomo left school after middle school, a common tendency in northern Italy where economic opportunity often trumps higher education. Although he and his family have prospered, their strong regional accents and frequent use of the local vernacular in personal conversations signal their working-class status. So although Giacomo may drive a fancier car than Valeria or Matteo, their extensive educational background and white-collar jobs put them in a relatively higher class position. I had occasion to overhear the sons’ grumbling during the roughly eleven months of noncontinuous ethnographic research I conducted with the company since 2005, observing their production processes, poring over their documents, discussing client relations and product pricing with Giacomo or the technicalities of pH testing with Valeria, and following various workers through their daily tasks, photographing and audio recording whenever possible.6 While I was present for both days of the inspection – indeed, my signature can be found on the final inspection report where I am listed as an “observer” – I recorded and subsequently transcribed only the second day’s activities. The issue I focus on here is the project the company undertook in the fall of 2012 in response to the alleged Listeria detection, during which they established a standard minimum number of days each of their cured products needs to be aged to reduce water content to safe levels. Because Listeria needs moisture to thrive, low water content has been accepted as evidence of its absence (pH levels are regarded as a similar type of evidence). In establishing and documenting these minimum aging periods, the company essentially obliged itself to abide by them in its practices. Consequently, it must either not sell cured products until they reach the minimum number of days or have a documented

110

Language and Materiality

system in place by which they warn clients to whom they release products early of the potential dangers and inform them of the date after which they will be safe for consumption. Straightforward, yes? Not when seen vis-à-vis the three labor modalities and their performativities. First, food practices. Performing the Material Are food practices really performative? The quick answer is no, or at least not all of them are. There are, however, performative moments within foodproduction practices, concentrated around occasions of reflection about the process, moments such as measuring ingredients, touching an object it to see if it “feels right,” or rejecting an item that is flawed in some way. These actions – a habitus (Bourdieu 1977; Paxson 2013) of learned, bodily processes – transform the items, moving them from one state (e.g., not ready for consumption) to another (e.g., ready for consumption). Such food-practice performative moments are most likely to occur toward the beginning of production, as ingredients are gathered, measured, and prepared; at times when ingredients are combined with other ingredients, such that proportions must be attended to; or at the end, when various characteristics of the product become relevant to determining if it is in fact finished and ready for consumption (i.e., “safe”). During the time I spent in this company and in others like it, I witnessed a number of such material performative moments. For instance, one of the workers on the main food production floor in this company is tasked with knowing when the impasto or mixture of ground meat and other ingredients (spices, wine and/or water, grated cheese) for filling sausages or salamis is mixed enough. To do this, he stands over the giant contraption in which paddles churn and materials tumble as ingredients are mixed together, looking at the color and texture of the mixture and at times stopping the machine to reach his hands in and feel it. Only when it looks and feels right to him will he turn off the mixing machine and allow the impasto to be transferred to the next machine for encasing. Likewise, only certain workers are ever assigned to do the actual encasing, a deceptively delicate task that requires carefully handling and manipulating the casings as the filling is piped into them. A number of bodily skills add up to a “feel” for doing it right, including sensing if the casings are flawed and knowing how filled a particular-sized casing can be without it bursting. Finally, at this and other companies, I watched producers decide if a salami or other cured meat product is done, which involves both knowing how long it has been aging and looking closely at the casing and its protective covering of beneficial molds, touching and squeezing the product, and smelling it. Only after all these material aspects are properly attended to can the product be deemed “finished” and ready for the market and consumption.

How the Sausage Gets Made

111

I consider these particular procedures to be moments of metaproduction (Shankar 2012), when the process and results of production are reflected on. They are performative in that they transform the product from one thing into another: from individual ingredients to impasto, from an unfinished product into a finished product, from something unsafe to consume into something safe to consume. Let me stress that these are necessary steps in production. Producers must perform these particular material procedures (touch the salamis to know if they are done, put their hands in the mix to see if it is the right texture) for the process to proceed correctly, and it is only through such performative moments that producers transform their products, moving them from one state into another. Having a set time for a mixing machine to run or aging process to occur is not enough – a person with the right bodily knowledge and skills must materially interact with the foods to effect this transformation. These performative food practices were rarely verbalized, unless the person executing them wanted another opinion, in which case he or she might minimally address another worker, asking, for instance, “Cosa pensi?” (What do you think?), without elaborating on what type of information was being requested. I had access to these processes either through repeated observation, such as watching the process of encasing over multiple occasions, or through my pointed ethnographic questions. “What is he doing?” sometimes led to a brief explanation, but more often involved a simple description of the task – such as “he’s checking to see if it’s ready” – followed by an embodied demonstration or possibly an invitation to feel for myself. This corresponded to an overall paucity of talk during production processes, except for short asides and brief instructions shouted over noisy machinery. The mediality, then, of this labor modality entails physical interaction between producers and food objects, but no or very little verbal interaction among producers. These physical interactions emerge out of specialized embodied knowledge, recalling Heidegger’s (1962) notion of “ready-to-hand” labor, which admits no divide between subject and object in certain moments of focused activity, particularly while using material tools or equipment. Perhaps not surprisingly then, during the part of the spring 2013 inspection spent walking around and looking at the physical plant and processes, little was said about these performative food practice moments. The exception was when they intersected with documents and talk, such as while inspecting the room where spices and chemical additives (e.g., preservatives such as sodium nitrate) were stored and measured. Within the food safety regime regulated and promoted by these certification schemas, adding other ingredients to meat is a critical control point (CCP), or moment in food production when doing things incorrectly can have serious health consequences for the consumer. As a CCP, it requires not only careful attention – exactly what made it into a performative food practice moment – but also careful and precise documentation of who

112

Language and Materiality

did it, when, how much of each ingredient was added, and according to which recipe. During the inspection as we walked around the plant, Matteo, the inspector, glanced around the spice room at the various containers, looked closely at the scale, asked who was in charge of the room and the activities that took place there, and wanted to see the documents that were involved. He did not ask to see – nor did anyone seem to expect him to want to see – the act of measuring or combining ingredients. Verbal reports and documents instead stood in for these processes, and if they were in line with what Matteo expected, then the food practices themselves were not subject to his inspection. The inspection, then, conjured a particular relationship between the linguistic and the material, where the former unproblematically stood for the latter, a relationship that underpins contemporary global food safety and regulatory systems. This is not to say that Matteo was not attending to and observing food production practices. Rather, what I want to emphasize here is that as long as these processes looked correct at a superficial glance (there was no rotting meat, for instance, lying in corners, and everyone’s hair was appropriately covered), the documents and what people told him about these procedures were evidence enough that these performative moments of metaproduction were being done correctly. But for those who work in this and other companies, these food practices are the most important thing that they do. The documents that evidence them and the talk that contextualizes or describes them are extraneous to the process of creating a safe and tasty product of high quality. As Giacomo and others told me in various ways, if they perform these tasks correctly, then everything else the company does (interact with bureaucrats and clients, produce the right documents, even participate in inspections like this one) will follow, because food practices produce safe food or, put another way, performatively generate food safety. Standardized times for aging products make no sense from this point of view: products are done (safe, ready to eat) when those who have the relevant skills and knowledge interact with them and pronounce them done (though this may require no actual verbal pronouncement). Time is just one factor such pronouncements will take into account. This prioritizing of food practices over other labor modalities instantiates a particular version of the “Listeria problem.” Except for that single test, the validity of which has been variously challenged, no Listeria has been detected at the company in more than twenty years, attesting to the efficacy of the work they do to make safe products correctly. The mediality of this labor modality – ready-at-hand physical interaction between producers, equipment, and food goods – means that talk and documents are external to its functioning and efficacy, existing only to represent those interactions. With no Listeria in the foodproduction practices, and talk and documents supposedly transparent representations of these material processes, then clearly, when seen from the point of view of this modality, there is no Listeria problem.

How the Sausage Gets Made

113

The Performativity of Talk Talk paints a remarkably different picture, as the so-called Listeria problem was explicitly named and extensively discussed during the inspection. There were numerous verbal efforts to define the problem itself: what it was, whose fault or responsibility it was, how it should or could be fixed. The performativity of such talk was dependent on indexicality, a mode of signification that emerges from contextual contiguity or causality. Briefly, indexes – linguistic, textual, or other interactionally relevant elements of context – may presuppose or bring to a particular context bits of social information. At the same time, the deployment of these indexes entails, or creates, social information as well, which will shape how the interaction unfolds. Performativity rests on just such indexical entailments, as the verbal performance of particular interactional acts, such as alignment among speakers or directing attention to certain features of the context, creates effects within and beyond those contexts. Talk in the context of food production has a particular mediality that relates to its performative capabilities: verbal activity carries indexical entailments through its interactional potentials among actors and their environments. These include alignment among participants, which is essential for performative processes to work efficaciously and produce transformations, whether it is social relationships that are enacted or altered (Faudree 2012; Manning 2012) or markets that are shaped via the discourse of particular consequential actors (Callon 1998; Holmes 2009; LiPuma and Lee 2002). Reflexivity in performative moments is also necessary, but never sufficient, to produce desired effects. Austin (1962) noted instances at the margins of the performative, when actors might try to “get away with something,” to issue an order when they are in no position to do so, for instance. The performative success of such marginal activity depends in large part on whether other participants in the activity permit such acts to count as performative or not (to do what they are told, for instance); in other words, whether they orient toward shared interactional and indexical frames. In the case at hand, the success and efficacy of performativity in talk depended on the alignment of participants (which was not always achieved), but also involved the negotiation of how such talk was related to documents and food production practices in the production of food safety. In the process, participants struggled to instantiate different or even competing versions of the problem at hand and how to solve it. Let us turn now to excerpts from my transcripts to see some of these instantiations. As Matteo and Valeria finished a coffee break and sat down to look over documents, the issue came up almost immediately. “Il problema è . . . ” (the problem is) or a similar phrase recurred multiple times, each time followed by a slightly different description. For instance, near the beginning of the conversation, Matteo and Valeria co-constructed the following version of the problem:

114

Language and Materiality

Example 1. matteo: I casi sono due: o l’azienda utilizza questo parametro per dire “non lo faccio uscire dal mio stabilimento finché non ha raggiunto i 72 giorni” oppure se il cliente me lo chiede comunque a 60 giorni? valeria: Abbiamo detto che viene accompagnato da una dicitura che [register shift] per esaltare al meglio le caratteristiche organolettiche dovrebbe rispettare . . . matteo: (ride) E dov’è che viene messo questo? valeria: In bolla. Viene gestito così. matteo: There are two possibilities: either the company uses this parameter to say “I won’t release it from my plant until it has reached 72 days” or if the client asks me for it anyway at 60 days? valeria: We’ve said that it will be accompanied by a phrase that [shift into high document-y register] in order to enhance the best organoleptic characteristics [of the product] they must respect . . . matteo: (laughs in response to register shift) And where will this be put? valeria: On the billing statement. It will be managed like that.

Here, Matteo and Valeria’s talk instantiates a problem – and its solution – and casts both in terms of talk and documents. Matteo ventriloquizes an imagined conversation in which the company tells a client they cannot have the product before the minimum number of days. But what if they ask for it early? Valeria assures him the solution is documentary: the company has said that such products will be accompanied by a short text on the billing statement that gives the minimum number of days before the product should be sold. It does so in the most positive terms, stating that this waiting period is to enhance the inherent material (“organoleptic”) characteristics of the product. No mention of Listeria is made either in this – at this point imagined – text or in the verbal exchange between Matteo and Valeria. The problem here is not in the food practices, but in how talk and especially documents are used to interact with parties outside of the company, such as clients. That Valeria essentially takes on the voice of the document through her register shift, which involved adopting a higher pitch and specialized lexicon (e.g., esaltare – enhance or exalt; caratteristiche organoleptiche – organoleptic characteristics), points to her talk’s mediality: verbal utterances with particular acoustic properties that contribute to their social indexical potentials. Valeria alters her voice and modulates her word choice not only to produce alignment between herself and Matteo (evidenced in his laughter in response) but also to align the two of them with the documents, the labor modality they prioritize as essential to food safety. When Giacomo arrived a few minutes later, Matteo introduced the topic by describing it in very different terms: Example 2. matteo:Per il problema della listeria sui prodotti stagionati . . . For [in terms of] the problem of the Listeria in the aged products . . .

How the Sausage Gets Made

115

Here Matteo constructs the problem as one of hygiene and food safety, as occurring within food production practices. This description echoes how the problem was introduced in the official inspection report, discussed later – which Matteo himself wrote at the end of the inspection – and portrays it in the most serious of terms. It names Listeria explicitly and places it in the most dangerous location it could occur: finished products, a hypothetical and hyperbolic description. While the analyses the company undertook were indeed designed to prevent this possibility, labeling the problem in this way presupposes the possibility of its existence. In placing Listeria in finished products, it also frames the problem as extremely important, necessitating immediate action. Although Matteo immediately followed this stark definition of the problem by offering a version similar to the one constructed in Example 1, this high-stakes framing performatively instantiates the problem as the presence of Listeria in food practices and their products. For Giacomo, however, there was no problem – except in the documents that falsely represented the presence of Listeria in his company – and the solution, should there arise a need for one, lies in talk. He responded to Matteo’s query about how the company would handle a client demanding a product before the minimum number of days like this: Example 3. giacomo: Allora il cliente si avvisa, si chiama, ci si parla, il cliente ha xxx la trattativa, “io te lo do però ricordati: sicuramente è a posto però io per quanto mi riguarda nei termini ufficiali dovrei dartelo tra dodici giorni, te lo do adesso tra 10 giorni o quello che sarà. Se tu lo vuoi te lo do però ci sarà scritto sulla bolla che il prodotto è pronto alla vendita tra . . . il giorno 27 di maggio.” Questo è il discorso che facciamo. Adesso però non ci è ancora capitato. giacomo: Well, the client is advised, is called, we talk to them, the client has [inaudible] the negotiation, “I will give it to you [informal second-person singular forms here and throughout], however, remember: certainly it’s fine, but I, regarding the official terms I should give it to you in twelve days, I give it to you now in ten days or whatever it will be. If you want it, I’ll give it to you but there will be written on the bill that the product will be ready for sale [to the consumer] by . . . the day of May 27.” This is what we say. [As of] now however, it hasn’t happened to us yet.

As the person in the company tasked with creating and maintaining relationships with clients, Giacomo is concerned with talk, second only to foodproduction practices, which he takes for granted as unproblematic. It is through talk that he maintains connections to the clients who are key to the company’s success. And these relationships are close, friendly, even intimate, as evidenced in his repeated use of the informal second-person pronoun form “tu” as he voices what he would say to a client about delaying the selling of a product should the need arise. In voicing himself within this imagined interaction with

116

Language and Materiality

a client, Giacomo uses the social indexical potentials of verbal talk in these pronomial forms to achieve alignment between himself and this imagined client in the face of a document that might otherwise stand between them. Metapragmatic, reflexive descriptions of talk as labor – here, its use in not only communicating but also creating relationships with customers – such as these are performative in that they instantiate the centrality of such interactions in the work of the company. Such talk has material effects. At other points in this interaction, as well as in other conversations with me, Giacomo made it clear that he feels there is nothing wrong with the company’s food practices: the products they make are safe and have been safe – hence the court proceedings he initiated to erase the documentary traces of someone else’s documentary, and possibly material, mistake. And while Giacomo is in large part responsible for ushering the company into the documentary regime embodied by this inspection, because he recognized it as a way to gain new clients and reassure old ones, his attitude toward it remains ambivalent. Documents for him are a means to an end; for instance, he can tell potential clients about the company’s ISO certifications, as part of talking them into doing business with the company. But documents are also potentially distancing, because they may exist outside of and thus conflict with talk (note, again, a presumed relationship of externality). Talk – intimate, friendly talk – must accompany and contextualize documents, particularly ones as potentially sensitive as these. Put another way, the indexical potentials of this document advising clients to wait for a certain amount of time before they sell these products might provoke a contemplation of risk in association with the company’s products. To suggest that these products might not be safe or that they must be treated as potentially unsafe before a certain date is, in a way, making them risky, whatever their material properties. Conflicting conceptualizations of how the three labor modalities are connected – and their relative importance in relation to food safety – produce a misalignment across talk and documents and their depictions of the problem. The mediality of documents – that is, that they take enduring, material forms that may persist beyond and across any particular interaction or relationship – means that they may and frequently do exist outside of the social, interactional alignments that may be achieved through the medium of talk. Such documents, then, constitute “the Listeria problem” for Giacomo, while it is through talk that he and others at the company can reassure clients of the continuing quality and safety of their products and frame the documents as necessary but trivial. Talk was similarly important to Valeria and Matteo, as they repeatedly discussed the problem and how to deal with it over the two days of the inspection, using the medial potentials of talk to align and realign with each other around these issues. Documents, however, were both the problem and the solution to which they were committed.

How the Sausage Gets Made

117

Performativity of Documents I had seen the boxes and boxes of documents on shelves and had been warned about the increasing centrality of “il lavoro della carta” (paperwork) at the company numerous times before this inspection. But I was still surprised that fully half of the inspection was spent handling and looking at documents: billing forms, production flow charts, lists of ingredients for various products, past inspection reports, descriptions of fire safety drills – all with their own specific materiality as physical objects or electronic files. As mentioned earlier, the documentary regime within which this and other companies operate rests on a semiotic ideology – Keane’s (2007) conceptualization of the frameworks that organize how things mean what they do – that depicts documents as transparently representing food-production practices. For example, if a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) flow chart, which is supposed to identify how hazards are avoided during production, does not match up with how production actually proceeds, this misalignment is problematic only in that it is a misrepresentation and must be rectified: either the document must be changed to reflect the material processes, or the processes must be changed to reflect the document. Such a flow chart is thus iconic, representing material processes through resemblance and similarity to those processes. Other documents may function indexically, pointing to objects, procedures, or other facets of production as assembled into particular configurations (e.g., recipe lists or fire safety procedures). The mediality of documents, then, includes these signifying potentials, as well as their material potentials to be written on, copied, torn up, held in one’s hand, discarded, or filed away indefinitely. The document produced in this inspection, for instance, lives on in multiple hard copies: one filed in the appropriate place at the company, one in my possession, and at least one taken away by Matteo to be filed in the relevant office of his employer. The various types of documents involved in food production help instantiate what they depict (Cavanaugh 2016a). Like the various performative moments discussed earlier, many of these documents are reflexive and portray what production is – or should be. Especially within this documentary regime of certification and inspection, documents such as HACCP charts and inspection reports are seen as governing the production processes that they describe, performatively organizing how production must proceed. Part of this lies in their mediality: once completed, they cannot be altered (without leaving traces of that alteration) and seem to – for those who can read them – mean the same thing (though of course this may be contested, as the company’s legal claim demonstrates). Once completed they live on, outside of the ready-to-hand fluid processes and interactional indexicalities that characterize food practices and talk, respectively. Their indexicalities may become just as static and fixed as their material forms.

118

Language and Materiality

And this is the crux of the issue when we turn to the Listeria problem from the point of view of documents. The project to determine the minimum amount of days needed for products to reach the right moisture level involved documents, as well as food production practices.7 These documents became both presupposing and entailing: they presupposed that the purpose of this project – which arose in reaction to the alleged Listeria finding – was to tighten up procedures and ensure safe production practices. By charting the minimum numbers of days for each product, they also acted to entail compliance with those numbers, requiring the company to act accordingly, to subsequently document these actions, and to produce the metadocuments (documents about how other documents are used) that describe how these documents would be handled (e.g., the text on the billing statement that Valeria recited for Matteo in Example 1). These performative potentials came into sharp focus when Matteo and Valeria turned their attention to documents during the inspection; what had perhaps before been descriptions of what they had done became, in Matteo’s hands, prescriptions for what they must do. But, aside from those that described what the company had done the previous fall, there were no such documents: nothing to describe how the company had acted since then, whether or not it had released goods early, or if and how, in doing so, it had informed clients of the state of these products and how they should be handled (ideally, not sold to consumers before the minimum number of days). There was, in other words, a substantial documentary gap. Valeria had ventriloquized a document that did not seem to exist. This gap was problematic for several reasons. First and most broadly, it left the company open to questions about its commitment to food safety. By failing to document that the company had followed the safety procedures it had established, the documents left open the possibility that the company had not followed such procedures and had thus potentially produced unsafe food. But this gap also raised a second question: if documents, through their indexical entailments, govern food practices, then what happens when those practices are not documented? Within the documentary regime operating here, undocumented food practices are inherently problematic, unknowable, and potentially dangerous. The only solution is to produce the appropriate documentation and fast. These linguistic forms, then, should interact with material practices in very particular ways. Both of these issues were ongoing and reached beyond the context of the inspection itself, posing challenges to the company’s food practices, as well as its commitment to the documentary regime enacted through the inspection, occasioning – as we glimpsed earlier – much discussion between Matteo, Valeria, and Giacomo. A third issue, however, was the most pressing within the context of the inspection: how to represent this documentary gap in Matteo’s final report (Rapporto di Verifica Ispettiva Sistemi di Gestione, or Management

How the Sausage Gets Made

119

Systems Inspection Verification Report). Here, the performative potentials of documents came to the fore, as this report would render the company either in compliance with or violation of ISO 14001 and 9001 production standards. It was supposed to be a transparent representation of how things are done at the company and what the inspector encountered there, explicitly describing the areas that the company must correct to remain in good standing and keep its certification. Here is how this issue appeared in the report: Example 4. A fronte della problematiche emerse per la presenza di listeria monocytogenes nei prodotti in fase di stagionatura, l’azienda ha dimostrato di aver effetuato una attenta analisi delle cause e di aver individuate opportune modalità per tenere sotto controllo la fase di stagionatura. A completamento dell’azione correttiva l’azienda non ha ancora apportato adeguate modifiche al piano di autocontrollo coerenti con le conclusion delle indagini effectuate (efficace monitoraggio dei tempi di stagionatura). In terms of the issues related to the presence of Listeria monocytogenes in products during the aging stage, the company has shown that they undertook an attentive analysis of the causes and have identified appropriate ways to monitor the aging phase. In terms of completing this corrective action, the company has not yet adopted adequate modifications to their self-regulating plan in line with the findings of their analyses (efficacious monitoring of the aging time periods).

Listed as a P or “potential” problem,8 the issue is framed not in terms of missing documents or problematic food practices, but as having to do with “efficacious monitoring the aging periods” in light of the analyses they had conducted – a reflexive process involving both food practices and documentary elements. As with Matteo’s opening question to Giacomo discussed earlier (Example 2), the text starts with a slightly misleading description of the issue in very serious safety terms: the presence of Listeria in cured products, and hence the concomitant risk to consumers’ health posed by the presence of a potentially lethal microbe in food items. The text then shifts to show the company in a positive light through describing its analyses as “attentive” and the monitoring methods it identified as “appropriate.” Finally, the problem is presented as simply one of follow-through: the company has not yet finished what it set out to do by building its findings into its production and documentary practices. Note especially that while the specific missing documents are not referred to, the current problem is still primarily documentary: the company has not yet modified its “piano di autocontrollo,” a phrase that translates imperfectly as a “plan or program for self-regulation,” a metadocument that describes and governs how a company checks its own practices and procedures to make sure they are done correctly and safely. The documents missing during the inspection are absent from the report, the ultimate metadocument that describes how things stand at the company

120

Language and Materiality

vis-à-vis its obligations to the certifying organization. The indexicalities of documentary performativity here are both presupposing and entailing – produced to describe people’s actions, surroundings, and intentions, but also obliging those described in them to act according to how they are depicted. The mediality of documents – again, “the quality, nature, and characteristics of the connections enabled by” this medium (Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume) – includes diagramming particular connections between actors, food practices, and production environments, but does not include interaction among actors or various types of fluid, body-centered processes, like feeling a salami to know if it is ready for consumption. Because documents are allegedly transparent representations of the material processes of food production, their iconic capacity, combined with their indexical entailing characteristics, produces their performative potential: if they resemble the world, then the world must also resemble them. Without the right documents, food practices are unknowable, uncontrolled, and not trustable. Food is not safe. The mediality of a document like an inspection report – as a fixed, static representation – means that the connections or gaps it diagrams cannot be shaped or altered by the ongoing processes of talk or food practices once it is completed, at least not until the next round of documentation occurs. So the problem, as performatively constructed through this document, was one of follow-through, and the solution lay in document production: the company must alter its self-regulation plan to reflect a change in food production practices depicted as already having occurred (adhering to the standardized aging periods). Whether producing the right documents so that they would be available for the next inspection was enough, or if this documentary shift would in fact change how the processes of aging their products was conducted remains to be seen. Performativities in Conflict Is the food produced by this company safe? Is the company producing food safely?9 The answers differ according to which labor modality is engaged or prioritized. In terms of food practices, its food is safe: no consumers have fallen ill, and no other detections of Listeria have occurred. From the point of view of both talk and documents, the picture is less clear. In their talk, Valeria and Matteo name the problem in various ways and suggest a range of solutions, making it real. For them, there is a problem that must be solved. Through talk, they align in their belief that the problem and its solution are documentary. In Giacomo’s talk, there are two problems, both documentary: the initial document alleging the presence of Listeria in his company, and the potential that documents suggesting that its products are risky could circulate unaccompanied by the type of friendly, intimate talk that keeps his business going. Talk is his

How the Sausage Gets Made

121

solution for both these problems, because of its ability to create and maintain social relationships that will ease his products’ path toward consumption, leaving no enduring traces of how such interactions proceeded or what specific information they contained. In the documents, a documentary gap that could open the company up to various problems is itself absent in the inspection report. The company is depicted as having a “potential” problem, which it is in the process of fixing. In both talk and documents, then, food safety is potentially at risk – but not, I would argue, for consumers. Rather, the risk is for the company itself, as it seeks to participate in documentary and inspection regimes that demand responses it is reluctant to give. Such a case demonstrates that food safety is a complicated notion. It is the outcome of ongoing and contingent processes that require various types of work: work that requires the integration of food practices, talk, and documents, but also produces misalignments across them. There are, of course, moments when food practices, documents, and talk coincide and align, as when a CCP (critical control point), such as adding sodium nitrate to an impasto, provoked moments of reflection across all three modalities. However, such moments are isolated and do not necessarily produce safe food, because ingredients can be mismeasured, no matter what is written down or the type of verbal instruction one may receive or the verbal report one may give to a visiting inspector. Looking across labor modalities and unpacking the performative potentials of each reveals the misalignments and contradictions that characterize the contemporary food system, where foods may sicken consumers even if all the correct documents are in order, where a lack of documents may prevent materially safe foods from reaching consumers, or where the right kinds of friendly talk may cut across both of these. By approaching language materially, as well as analyzing the linguistic and the material together, the performative potentials of each modality emerge. These performativities are dependent on the medialities afforded by these modalities, such that documents endure with their indexical potentials fixed in ways that entail particular responses, potentially disrupting or reshaping the flow of both food practices and the connections enabled by verbal interaction. Talk allows for the fluidity of social connections and negotiation, but may elide the types of traces that current food regulatory regimes depend on as evidence of safe food. Food practices, while described via talk and documents, connect above all bodies and objects, standing just for themselves and leaving no room for gaps between producers, the foods they create, and the bodies that will consume these foods, even as they are increasingly governed and shaped by documentary and verbal processes. Given the necessary roles played by these three labor modalities in contemporary food production, and how their distinctive medialities contribute to how labor proceeds, it seems clear that slippages and conflict across and among them are inevitable in the current

122

Language and Materiality

food regulatory system that relies on documents, requires talk, and assumes that the relationship of both to food practices is straightforward and transparent. Additionally, traceability and knowability are themselves partial and socially constructed, requiring a type of alignment among these three labor modalities that may in fact be rare. Despite assumptions that documents of various sorts – from labels to HACCP charts – transparently represent the material procedures of food production and characteristics of products, the nature of this signifying relationship is far from assured or simple. These findings, then, may have deep relevance to consumer-driven movements to make products of various sorts more knowable and traceable to their sources, from local food activism and community-supported agriculture (CSA) organizations, both of which valorize direct interaction between consumers and producers; to the fair trade movement, which often includes various types of certifications and labeling to link consumers and producers; to the growing tendency for a particular type of restaurant in the United States to name the farms from which it sources its food, where farm names or named farmers stand in for the high quality of the food and the food practices that produced it. Fine-grained ethnographic and linguistic analyses undertaken within a language materiality framework can illuminate how international movements, regulatory schemes, and policies are grounded in the everyday practices of production. Likewise, a focus on such everyday practices may demonstrate the reach and strength of global forces that support documentary and inspection regimes like the one discussed here. Questions such as what makes food safe, or evidence that this is a contingent, complex process that involves far more than simply documenting food practices, should provoke us as anthropologists to think about how contemporary capitalism requires particular types of evidence of its processes, as well as new types of labor to produce, circulate, and support this evidence. I focused on the mediality of talk, documents, and food practices so as to offer a model for how to approach language materially and analyze the material as intertwined with language. Considering register shifts and the enduring nature of documents (see Dickinson, this volume) alongside the activity of squeezing a salami to determine if it is ready to be eaten helps illuminate how the sausage gets made in contemporary capitalist food production, in both the literal and metaphorical senses.

N OT E S 1 Listeria monocytogenes, while permitted in infinitesimal doses in cured meats in the EU (below 100 cfu/g ([colony-forming unit per gram]), is a potentially lethal bacteria that may pose health risks to consumers. 2 The name of the company and all personal names that appear here are pseudonyms. Certain ethnographic details have been changed to assure anonymity.

How the Sausage Gets Made

123

3 Briefly, standards such as these are internationally developed and adhered to. The nongovernmental International Organization for Standardization (www.iso.org/iso/home .html accessed July 23, 2014) is the central body that develops the specific protocols, while independent agencies (which may be independent or governmental) provide certification and assessment. 4 Italian regional governments employ ASL workers (mostly veterinarians or veterinarian technicians) to inspect all animal-related food-making activities, including barns, salami- and cheese-making facilities, and slaughterhouses. 5 I cannot explain the apparent contradiction embodied in the fact that the company seemed to have undertaken a project to fix a problem they insisted – legally – did not exist, except that it was operating under an abundance of caution. 6 Thanks to the CUNY Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation, whose support (Cultural Anthropology Senior Research Grant #BCS-1259752) made this research possible. 7 Although I was not privy to it, one can imagine that this process involved extensive talk as well. 8 Items listed in the report are ranked in terms of their relative importance: E (essenziale – essential), I (importante – important), P (potenziale – potential), and SM (spunto di miglioramento – point of improvement). To keep its certification, it is obligatory for the firm to address all but the last category, which is optional. 9 For the record, I have eaten this company’s products and happily fed them to my family many times.

REFERENCES Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Callon, Michel. 1998. “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics.” In The Laws of the Markets, edited by Michel Callon, 1–57. Oxford: Blackwell. Cameron, Deborah. 1997. “Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity.” In Language and Masculinity, edited by Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, 47–64. New York: Oxford University Press. Cavanaugh, Jillian R. 2016a. “Documenting Subjects: Performativity and Audit Culture in Food Production.” American Ethnologist 43(4). 2016b. “Talk as Work: Economic Sociability in Northern Italian Heritage Food Production.” Language and Communication 48:41–52. Dunn, Elizabeth. 2007. “Escherichia coli, Corporate Discipline, and the Failure of Audit.” Space and Polity 11:35–53. Faudree, Paja. 2012. “How to Say Things with Wars: Performativity and Discursive Rupture in the Requerimiento of the Spanish Conquest.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22(3):182–200.

124

Language and Materiality

Graeber, David. 2012. “The Sword, the Sponge, and the Paradox of Performativity: Some Observations on Fate, Luck, Financial Chicanery, and the Limits of Human Knowledge.” Social Analysis 56(1):25–42. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Holmes, Douglas. 2009. Economy of Words. Cultural Anthropology 24(3):381–419. Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kulick, Don. 1993. “Speaking as a Woman: Structure and Gender in Domestic Arguments in a New Guinean Village.” Cultural Anthropology 8(4):510–541. LiPuma, Edward, and Ben Lee. 2002. “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity.” Public Culture 14(1):191–213. Manning, Paul. 2012. The Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Paxson, Heather. 2013. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shankar, Shalini. 2012. Creating Model Consumers: Producing Ethnicity, Race, and Class in Asian American Advertising. American Ethnologist 39(3):578–591. Tompkin. B.A. 2002. “Control of Listeria in the Food-Processing Environment.” Journal of Food Protection. 65(4):709–723. Tracy, Megan. 2013. “Pasteurizing China’s Grasslands and Producing Terroir.” American Anthropologist 115(3):437–451.

7

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!”: How Honk Horns Voice the Acoustic Materiality of Reputation in Accra∗ Steven Feld

Introduction Language, certainly speaking, is typically imagined as ephemeral, as vocalized acts that disappear into listening acts. In this chapter, announced by the title, a perspective is offered that imagines, with this volume’s editors, that “the very nature of language use is material” (see Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume). The form of this argument, however, is presented not as a sequential unfolding of theoretical propositions or through detailed ethnographic elaborations of language use. Rather, it is performed as a pileup of stories, voiced acts of telling interwoven with other modes of signing and, particularly, sounding. The argument about the material nature of language is thus constantly entangled with a larger one about the material nature of sound and music, and the relevance to all of the theories of iconicity and poetics associated with Roman Jakobson and the theories of polyphony and dialogism associated with Mikhail Bakhtin. The storytelling form here relates strongly to the origin of these words in a lecture to honor Annette Weiner. Written to be sounded rather than read (except by me, while speaking the script), the impetus was a conversation with Annette about the logic of separating or collapsing ideas about ephemerality and materiality, ideas ultimately about larger anthropological stakes in understanding resonance and memory, reputation and consequence. These out-loud vocalized remembrances relate to critical themes in the editors’ introduction: the sonic

∗

This chapter was originally read as the 2008 Annette Weiner Memorial Lecture for the Department of Anthropology at New York University. I thank Fred Myers, then department chair, and the NYU Department for the generous invitation to honor a wonderful colleague and friend; Bambi B. Schiefflein for many conversations on the sensuous evidence of linguistic materiality; and Ruti Talmor for the 2004 introduction to Accra that ultimately led to encountering Por Por music in 2005. I thank Jillian Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar for inviting a piece that dialogically perfoms the resonance of conversations across multiple NYU generations. Portions of this chapter previously appeared in the Por Por chapter of Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Feld 2012a).

125

126

Language and Materiality

materiality of language forms, the contextual materiality of physical spaces of enunciation, the medial materiality of multiple linguistic (and here sonic and musical) media, and mediatization. In other words, the text “stories” out a suggestive relationality of bodies, objects, vocalizations, and soundings that are interdiscursive, intertextual, intermodal, and intervocal. For an elaboration on the theoretical background and ethnographic applications of this kind of vocal anthropology and acoustemology see Feld and Fox (1994); Feld, Fox, Porcello, and Samuels (2004); and Feld (2012a 2012b, 2015). Materializing Conversation This is about the multiply intertwined materialities of Por Por, a horn honking music from Accra, Ghana. It is about a world of old lorries, their drivers, mates, and passengers. It is about their now-antique klaxon horns, how those horns became musical instruments, and how those instruments perform memorial music for driver funerals. Along with the music, other funerary arts, particularly coffin carving is involved, and along with the lorries and klaxons, diverse other objects, including cloth, documents, uniforms, insignias, paintings, signs, photographs, and souvenirs, are also in play. All of this takes place in a distinctive local sound environment, one especially charged by voice, by stories, and by the performance of names in a spiritual habitus of deep listening. The historical-intercultural timespace now approaches seventy years, and while sited in Accra, Ghana, and even more specifically in one of its townships, La, the presence of Europe and the United States is never far away. To open a door into this world of acoustemology in contemporary Accra, I will recount a conversation I had with Annette Weiner in 1990. It was a conversation about how so many of us working in Papua New Guinea then were endlessly caught up in thinking through reciprocity and obligation, often enough coming back to mortuary rituals, to the public emotional business of dealing with death, not to mention dealing with tensions between enmity and sociality. We talked about the many ways objects and currency stand in as, and for, persons in funerary exchange. We talked about how New Guinea person-ness and thing-ness are endlessly entangled. I told Annette that the absence of material object-based exchanges at Bosavi funerals led me to think about how words, texts, voices, and sounds constitute a similar network of circulation. I told her that while Western epistemology and anthropology’s received divisions strongly insisted on the difference between the material and intangible, I was more and more convinced that there was little difference between them in the production of memory in Papua New Guinea. Annette took issue with that, gently but firmly insisting that there were real problems amalgamating the exchange circulation of names, words, and songs

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

127

with cloth, bundles, baskets, carvings, food, and so forth. She suggested that it was important to distinguish material from ephemeral, especially in regard to circulatory consequence, despite our agreement that at the end of the day it was all about reputation and how to look after it. Now, fast forward to another conversation, one Annette had with close colleagues Fred Myers and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, reproduced in the chapter that closes The Empire of Things, Myers’s edited collection of essays dedicated to Annette (Myers 2002). In that conversation Annette commented on the distinctions between perishable and permanent objects, their durability and temporality, indeed, their material renewability: I came up with an idea that actually I got from a Nobel prizewinner at the turn of the century. He talked about things that have a permanence having energy, and they continue to have this energy. That’s what allows them to circulate and become other things. Something that is iron can be smelted down, it can have another life, these things continue. (Myers 2002: 277; emphasis added)

Is sound any different from iron? It has precisely this kind of energy, and words, songs, stories, ambiences surely have endless generativity to transform, truncate, elaborate, expand, contract, and morph toward more vague or more precise; flow toward secondary, tertiary, and further multiple lives; and create echoic reproductions that circulate in multiple ways. Can voices and sounds be smelted down like iron? I still think the answer is yes. Horns Voice Reputation Por por (phonetically pɔɔ pɔɔ) is the name of the squeeze-bulb klaxon horn introduced to Ghana and its colonial Bedford, Austin, and Morris lorries in the late 1930s by East Asian traders. These horns were attached to wooden lorries central to carrying passengers, trucking goods, and opening up the timber and market roads in Ghana in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. These vehicles were locally called tsolorley, “wooden lorry,” and with public transport of passengers came to be known as tro tro – tro from “three pence,” the original cost of an inner-city ride. In the township of La, one of the seven Accra residential areas of Gaspeaking people – the city’s original inhabitants – something very unique happened. The La drivers took these por por horns off of their tsolorley and with them developed a honking, squeeze-bulb horn music with the addition of tire rims, bells, drums, songs, and dances. Their drivers’ union Por Por group developed and was formalized in the late 1960s and is now active performing at drivers’ funerals for the memory of departed union colleagues. Because the Por Por players are unionized drivers and not professional musicians, and because the music was only performed at worker funerals, there

128

Language and Materiality

were no recordings or documentation. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Ghana’s March 6, 1957 independence, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings released the CD, Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana (La Drivers Union Por Por Group 2007). I produced that project from 2005–2007 together with Accra photographer Nii Yemo Nunu, son of the legendary La driver, Ataa Anangbi Anangfio. That CD reveals how Por Por horn music honks a multilayered story of regional history, colonialism, the diaspora, and globalization. In the context of Ghanaian indigenous music history, Por Por obviously derives from mmenson, the multipart animal horn ensemble music of Akan origin. Later there is also a clear articulation with brass band music, indigenized from colonial origins to become central to the sound of highlife and combo jazz. Radio in 1940s and 1950s Ghana brought well-remembered big-band jazz recordings, such as those of Count Basie, to listeners in Accra. The sound and choreography of big-band saxophone sections seen in popular film shorts also had a role in shaping the Por Por performance style. As the music became ritually specialized – only played by La drivers and exclusively at funerals for transport industry workers – another Black Atlantic connection was revealed to the “rejoice when you die” musical traditions of the New Orleans jazz funeral, the driver’s road to heaven paved by road songs and the sounds of car horns (Sakakeeny 2013). Specific local markers of global musical contacts also entered the mix. A Ghanaian television show of the 1960s, Show Biz, used as its theme music a lively arrangement of Broadway “belter” Ethel Merman’s rendition of the Irving Berlin song, “There’s No Business like Show Business.” One of the catchy saxophone section phrases in the arrangement, itself reminiscent of the background vamp to Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” was picked up as a por por horn riff. The result was a distinctive sound signature relating the honking of Por Por music to the modernity of both African American bebop jazz and Ghana’s television service in the years immediately after independence. I entered into this story in May 2005. As my taxi pulled up toward the Drivers Union office in La, it was overtaken by the honking and singing of the Por Por band, surrounding, greeting, and escorting me down the final stretch of road to their office. We did the first round of brief greetings outdoors, with honked fanfares in between introductions and poured libations. As the music ended, I was told, “Prof, you are welcome. The good Lord has blessed us with your presence, Prof, and we pray that you will be happy and come back to hear us blow.” Those first words were spoken to me by the man everyone calls “Vice,” the Por Por group leader and union vice chairman, Nii Ashai Ollennu. To Vice’s left stood Adjei, the group’s lead instrumentalist. “Prof,” Vice continued, “this is Adjei, our number one blowing por por man.” As our handshake slid toward a finger snap, Adjei smiled and said, “Prof, you are welcome. You can call me PARker, (extended pause), Charlie PARker.”

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

129

I was still green, verbally that is. It was not until later that I learned why the delay in Adjei’s delivery had such playful value added. In Ghanaian English, everyone male is called Charlie. Charlie is man, guy, dude, bud. The ubiquitous flip-flop footwear is called “Charlie Wɔtey” (Charlie, let’s go!). But the name Charlie for generic man comes from someone famous for rather different footwear – Charlie Chaplin, everyman. Later I learned that it was Adjei, Parker, Charlie PARrker, who was hip to the Dizzy Gillespie vamp on the head of “A Night in Tunisia.” He was the one who introduced bebop phrasings and syncopations to Por Por, re-grooving the metrics of Ghanaian dance rhythms. In the 1960s, the government declared wooden vehicles too unsafe for innercity transport in case of traffic accidents. So the mammy wagons have become restricted to long-distance transport, and today they are a relatively rare sight in Accra, replaced by metal minibuses still generically called tro tro. But in La one still sees tsolorley all the time. La township holds an important place in all of this history, and it is no accident that it is the birthplace of Por Por music. Because the Burma Camp Barracks, a sizable colonial station, was located on land owned by the people of La, a great number of transport vehicles were in the vicinity during the long colonial period. Men from La sought employment at the Barracks, taking up driving as a profession or becoming specialized machinists or car mechanics. Ataa Awuley, the first local man to hold an Accra driver’s license, was from La, and the legendary 1920s Gold Coast governor and commander-in-chief, Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg, had a personal driver from La, Dzatei Abbey. In pride, the community renamed him Dzatei Guggie. The practice connecting names, stories, vehicles, and material reputations has developed considerably since then. At the January 2008 funeral for Humphery Ablorh Annang, known as “Humphery Bogerd,” the Por Por Group was called on to send up the body with a session of spirited honks. Just outside the funeral chamber stood a coffin modeled on a classic wooden-body Bedford tsolorley. Prepared by one of the local workshops, it waited, ready to receive the body for its final journey on the succession of literal and spiritual roads to follow. The coffin was signed “Humphery” on its mantle, following the practice of inscribing a vehicle with personal names, distinctive phrases, or proverbs associated with a driver, his personality, his road stories. Like the vehicle, the name is a memorial testimony to reputation. Indeed, the material history of the vehicle and its driver’s work is completely merged with the circulatory history of that driver and vehicle’s name, and its repeated verbal citation. While I abstractly understood the Ghana parallel to the Papua New Guinea sentiment here – that photos, licenses, and documents, like a worker’s coffin, will stand in for a driver’s memory, his reputation of “name” – the material significance of work to memory and memory to work was brought home to me more directly one afternoon as I traveled with the La Por Por Group.

130

Language and Materiality

I was asked, “Prof, do you want us to bury you in a camera or microphone?” “Uh . . . I don’t know, Amarh [dumbfounded pause] . . . I mean, I’ve never thought about it,” I replied. “You see, it’s your work, like driving is our work,” Nii Amarh Amartey offered quickly. “So your coffin will tell the story of your work; that’s why you can have a camera or a microphone.” When he said those words to me I was wearing a stereo microphone on my head and had a video camera in my hands. I was seated next to him in a minibus filled with Por Por band members, and we were returning from the funeral of a prominent driver who was buried in a carved wooden replica of his vehicle. Later that week we made a video of Nii Yemo Nunu, my collaborator, presenting and discussing his collection of independence-era photographs and the uniform his father, driver of “M.V. Labadi,” wore on Ghana’s Independence Day. Afterward, as we packed up, he asked me: “Prof, have you kept something like that?” “You mean an important family object?” “Yes, something like that.” “Clothing no, but I have my grandfather’s clock, a big one, taller than me. When I was a little boy I loved the sounds and my fascination delighted my grandfather, so he left the clock to me. It stayed in our family house for thirty years after he died, and then it came to live with me. So it has been in the family a long time.” “You see, we all have one custom,” he reflected. “Maybe you don’t pour libation like we do, but you are including the ancestors in how you live, just as they include you. So when you hear the clock you know your grandfather is around somewhere just as he knows you are aware of him. That is like me having my father’s uniforms in the wardrobe. You see, we all have one custom.” The look on my face likely signaled that I was not entirely convinced about this, so Nii Yemo continued, developing the thought: We are keeping the names of the ancestors with us when we keep their things. That is why we inscribe the vehicles. The inscription gives you reputation, because your name then follows to your son, daughter, wife. Even your driving mate can be called by the name of the vehicle. Me, all the time in the streets in La people will call out, “Hey, M.V. Labadi, where are you going? Hey, M.V. Labadi, how is it?” So the reputation of my father’s work is always with me. You don’t know how far name goes! Now I walk around town and people call me “M.V. Labadi” though my father has died more than thirty-five years ago . . . . This is why the inscription will always be remembered. It’s the driver’s name.

On their front and rear mantles and tailgates, vehicles have always displayed distinctive phrases or proverbs associated with the names, personalities and road stories of their drivers and owners. On the CD recording of the song honoring “M.V. Labadi,” the Por Por band asked Nii Yemo to rap the names of

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

131

Image 7.1 “Fear not”

many of the classic vehicles from his father’s era in the 1950s. These included “They Talk What They Don’t Know,” “It Pays Your Way,” “Sweet Mother,” “Slow but Sure,” “Fear Not,” “Safety First,” “No Sympathy,” “All Shall Pass,” “Never Say Die,” “God’s Time Is the Best.” “No Condition Is Permanent,” “Champion,” “Don’t Try,” “No Fear,” “Goods Only,” “Your Time Go Come,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” and “Quo Vadis” (see Image 7.1). Following up on Nii Yemo’s suggestion that I learn the vehicle names associated with the band members, I asked the leader, “Vice, did you write something on your vehicle? “Yes, Prof, I wrote ‘May be.’” “Why did you write ‘May be’?” “Prof, you see, when you are driving people ask you sooo many things and all you can say is “may be.” When they ask you if something is true or another thing will happen, you can’t really say. Either it can happen or not, it can be true or not. So that’s why I called my vehicle ‘May be’ (see Image 7.2). In January 2006, Nii Yemo Nunu and I commissioned Accra sign-painter Nicholas Wayo to do a cover painting for the Smithsonian Folkways Por Por CD. We asked Nicholas to paint a classic independence-era Bedford tro tro

132

Language and Materiality

Image 7.2 “May be”

bearing the La drivers’ union logo: hands on a steering wheel topped by a crowing cock to symbolize industriousness, surrounded by a por por horn and double bell. We asked him to site the vehicle heading down the La road along the cloudy Accra seacoast, an image from a song. Nico suggested “Sea Never Dry” as a mantle inscription (see Image 7.3). The phrase was signed on several 1950s vehicles and comes from a famous song by highlife king E. T. Mensah, whose portrait also hangs at the union office. When I returned in January 2008, two years after that commission, I brought the union its first royalty check from Smithsonian Folkways. To accompany its presentation I asked Nicholas Wayo to repeat the same painting for the union office, topping it, in Ga, with “Congratulations and praises to you all.” On his own Nicholas decided to change the mantle inscription from “Sea Never Dry” to “Dromo” (Blessings). As he and his assistant held the painting for a snap, I asked, “Why did you change the tro tro name?” “Prof, their ship has come in.” Many earlier and most contemporary tro tro and taxis bear some kind of Christian or Muslim religious slogan like “Blessings” on their rear windows, either in English, Ga, Ewe, or Twi. I encountered them often: “By His Grace,” “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” “Jesus Saves,” “Hallelujah,” “Blood of the Lamb,”

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

133

Image 7.3 “Sea Never Dry”

“Merciful God,” “Pentecost Fire,” “The Prophet,” “In the Name of Allah,” “Young Hajj.” One day I was reviewing tapes with the union chairman, Quarshie Gene. “Chief, did you inscribe your lorry back in the days when you were a working driver?” “Oh yes, Prof, of course. In fact, I called it “Hallowed Be Thy Name.”” “Why?” “Ona, you see, Prof, because I love The Lord’s Prayer. And there was already a tro tro signed “Our Father.” And another signed “Who Art in Heaven.” So I came behind with “Hallowed Be Thy Name.” And you know “Thy Kingdom Come,” he is parking behind the petrol station. We also had “Thy Will Be Done.” “On Earth as It Is in Heaven” still carts goods in from Bawjiase, you can see him at the yard Tuesday afternoons.” “Yes,” I say, “just last week I was in a taxi signed ‘Our Daily Bread.’” But I stopped short of telling him that there was once a famous linguistic philosopher named Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) who drove a tro tro named “Polyphony.” On its rear tailgate was signed his motto: “the word in language is half someone else’s.” So to take stock: the horn enters the arena as a commodity, purchased and used on vehicles as a practical signaling device, sounding out warnings,

134

Language and Materiality

announcements, and requests, marking the everyday life passage of the vehicle, becoming its voice on the road. As such it resides acoustically in a figure and ground relationship to the road, to the running engine, and all the other squeaks and hums, the voices and radios, the larger acoustic environment of the vehicle, those who move in, briefly inhabit, and move out of it, and all the sounds that surround it in its pickups, drops, its movements on the road. But more, the horn, like the mantle sayings, becomes part of the vehicle’s material presentation and history; thus, its reputation, its personality, its distinctiveness. This distinctiveness is directly tied to the character, the personality of its owner and driver, whose own expressive tendencies, vocal repertoire, ethical manner of working, and interaction with the world of the road are performed through horn honking. As announcer of passage and presence, the driver attempts to conduct the orchestra called traffic in the symphony hall called the highway. His por por horn becomes his voice, and that voice, like his mantle signage, is his “name.” Off the vehicle, recontextualized as musical instrument, the por por horn embodies and rematerializes all the sensory dimensions of its prior life. When it becomes a musical instrument, it is fitted with a new bulb, a larger and more flexible one, capable of faster squeezing, of more voice. The new bulb pushes more air through the tubing, makes the new body and voice bigger. “All the way from the bee-hind to the mouth, Prof,” Vice explains. He is referring to the fact that the por por becomes a musical instrument through the grace of the local medical supply shop, where the union buys the Czech-made size ten enema bulbs that make the horns blow fast and loud. All of that sonic materiality is sounded in vocal iconicity. Pɔɔ pɔɔ, the reduplicated name, is packed thick with vocal physics: a pulmonic egressive voiceless bilabial plosive tailing off to double-length nasalized vowels. Roman Jacobson, who urged that the whole of language is a sea of potentially consummatable iconicities, only a very few of which are ever consummated, delighted in such splish-splash morphophone pileups (1980, 1985). The high priest of both linguistic iconicity and poetic parallelism reportedly liked to quip, in his own inimitable English, “Some words just TAke the CAke.”1 The Empire of Names and Stories “This is my teacher,” said then-NYU anthropology graduate student Ruti Talmor, introducing me to some of her friends at the National Arts Centre during my first week in Accra in 2004: “Teacher, you are welcome.” “Hello, thank you, my name is Steve.” “Teacher, you are welcome.” “You can call me Steve.” “Professor, you are welcome!” “My friends call me Steve.” “Prof, you are welcome.”

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

135

“So what do I do to get people to address me by my name,” I ask Ruti later. “You don’t,” she said. “You have age and status. They need to show you respect. They can’t do that by addressing you by your name; it would be really uncomfortable. Anyway, nicknames are big here; they’re friendly, and important, like respect for seniority.” Of that I have been endlessly reminded. For example, a call from Vice woke me earlier than usual one morning. “Prof, The good Lord has taken our brother Ashirifie, rest his everlasting soul. The Lord works in mysterious ways, Prof. We have lost our brother and we must now prepare to blow big to help send him on his passage.” Like Vice, Ashirifie had been active since the late 1960s in the Por Por group. By the time I met him three years earlier, he was well in place in his retirement job as superintendent of the union office – holding the keys, opening and closing the office, greeting people, keeping the office clean and organized. He was also caretaker of the Por Por group’s instruments and uniforms, lovingly ironing and folding them before each performance. Friends played on the sound of his name Ashirifie, transforming it to Sheriff, smelting it down to Ricky. Who knows which came first: Ashirifie’s cotton plaid shirts or being nicknamed Ricky Nelson. But he was a respected man. Rarely was he just called Ricky. It was always Ricky Nelson, Mister Nelson, Sheriff Ricky, Mister Ricky, Sheriff Nelson. It turns out that he also had the given name of Nelson. In the mid-1990s that led to another nickname: Mandela. My personal nickname for Ashirifie was “Lester Young” because of the way he would swing his por por horn off to the side or in frontal circular motions, recalling the gestural practice and bodily stance of the famous saxophonist of the Count Basie band. Ashirifie fancied caps and hats. In his repertory was a black felt one that also recalled the saxophonists of the 1950s era, although Lester Young was more famously known for wearing the porkpie hat. Jazz legend holds that on the night Young died the news was passed to bassist Charles Mingus while he was on the bandstand playing. A kernel from his improvisation in the moment became the opening melody of his composition, “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” a sensuous jazz lament memorial to Young. The song took on an expanded listening life when Joni Mitchell (1979) wrote lyrics to it, just before Mingus himself died, and recorded it in tribute to the bassist: When Charlie/ speaks of Lester/ you know someone/ great has gone// The sweetest/ swinging music man/ had a porky/ pig hat on//

Like the hat that tops the head, reputation here is the pileup of names one accumulates through life, the ways they are layered into and implicated in the pileup of gigs played, roads driven, flat tires pumped, funerals attended, uniforms

136

Language and Materiality

ironed, doors locked and unlocked, floors swept, drinks poured and drunk, stories told, handshakes snapped. Ashirifie’s nickname for me – “Right hand man!”– was no less about deeds, reputation, and verbal play. It is a name that derives from a story Ashirifie liked to laugh over and over, about the day I showed up early for a meeting at the union office and did a very unsenior, very un-white-man thing; namely, helping him set out the chairs for the event. In the months following his passing, I filmed Ashirifie’s por por funeral and produced, with Nii Yemo, A Por Por Funeral for Ashirifie (Feld 2009). The film closes with a powerful libation speech. While we were editing the sequence I asked Nii Yemo the name of the elder with the astonishingly deep and resonant voice who poured the drinks and spoke it. He said he did not know him by name and had not met him before, but would find out his name so that I could add it to the final film credits. A few mornings later, Nii Yemo sent the name, with no other comment, as a text message from his cell phone to mine: “Ashirifie Frank Sinatra.” If senior male speeches accompanying libations were delivered with calm, yet pointed, direct address to Ashirifie, the powerful contrast was the singing while crying that women performed through the process – most powerfully throughout the film sequence where overlapping bells, songs, prayers, horn honks, conch shell, and flute laments sound as the band and closest mourners surrounded the body and voiced their presence to Ashirifie before he was placed in his coffin. “Why leave this beautiful life?” one crying woman asks, her sorrowful rhetorical question overlapped by numerous others telling Ashirifie to wake up and come back – reminding him, and everyone listening, of the pain his passing has produced. In the final moments of that sequence, just before the coffin is brought into the room to receive the body, the por por players break into “Novi Deke,” a song whose simple text laments, “I have no brother, I’m all alone, finished without you.” As they sing it, Olojo (Hello Joe) Mensah’s voice rises above the horns, shells, and wailing. Waving a yellow-and-black Por Por band uniform t-shirt over the body, he addresses Ashirifie one last time: “Ashirifie!! Here! We wore this shirt with you! And you wore it with us! Now we are giving it to you to take on your journey.” With that he lays the shirt on Ashirifie’s chest, a final act of vocal and material respect to link a past and future of work pride on the por por “road.” To enter even more thoroughly the ways names link persons, stories, reputations, vehicles, and discursive circulations, take the story of a special vehicle in La, parked at the Total gas station as you enter the town. It is named “Boafo” (Good Friend) and is owned by Frank Annertey Abbey, known to all La residents as “America Man.” Boafo is a kind of hybrid small tsolorley. On the wooden door is painted a Ghanaian and American handshake, based on the U.S. Agency for International Development insignia.

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

137

In 1998, when President Bill Clinton visited Accra, the U.S. entourage took over the nearby La Royal Palm Hotel. Someone saw America Man’s Boafo sitting at the La gas station and asked that it be parked in the La Royal Palm driveway during the official visit. America Man obliged. Rumor has it that Bill Clinton and some ranking Ghanaian politicians were photographed shaking hands in front of the vehicle’s signboard. But nobody has ever been able to locate that picture. America Man is still trying to find it. He has begged for my help on virtually every occasion that we have met. Per chance Nii Yemo and I walked into a La bar for some refreshment one afternoon, and there we encountered America Man: “America Man, how are you? It is good to see you again.” “America Prof, you are welcome! Welcome Prof, oh Welcome!! Fine! Fine! Prof Take a seat with me.”

Nii Yemo brought us a round of Guinness malt drinks, and as we sat I asked America Man the question of the moment: “America Man, did the La Palm ask you to bring your Boafo during last week’s Accra visit of President Bush?” Long pause. “John Kennedy,” he answered. Pause. “John Kennedy, yes, John F. Kennedy.” An even longer pause as he adjusts his Ray Charles-esque tortoise shell wraparound knockoff Gucci sunglasses. “Yes, John Kennedy. That’s why I was inspired to paint Boafo with an American handshake. I saw your America for a looong time, Prof, Washington DC, Maryland. Chevy Chase. Silver Spring. I drove. Once all the way to Florida. Yes, John Kennedy, John F. Kennedy. The man.” Another long pause. “And Bill Clinton too. Yes Bill Clinton. I love him too.” Later Nii Yemo tells me that one of the three jumbo airplanes that the Bush party brought to Accra for their twenty-four hour drop-in was filled with presidential vehicles. This time when the American entourage took over the La Palm Royal hotel, the driveway was packed with a presidential fleet of armored Cadillacs. “All the drivers from La walked over to see them,” he said. “But the place was surrounded by rings of soldiers and security. Everyone was chased away. None of us were welcome. That’s why America Man didn’t speak your president’s name.” When he lived in the United States, America Man took the name of the boxer-turned toughguy-thug actor Jack Palance, whose original name was Volodymyr Palahniuk. America Man called himself “Jack,” or “Palance,” sometimes “Heavy Palance,” or “Palance Motherfucker.” Sometimes he called himself by the names of his favorite Palance films: the 1952 Shane or the 1953 I Died a Thousand Times. He also called himself “The Meanest Guy That Ever Lived,” after a country song written and recorded by Palance in the early 1960s. But people in the United States were, not surprisingly, confused when he introduced himself as “Jack Palance.” So he also called himself “Lee Palace of

138

Language and Materiality

Image 7.4 “In God We Trust”

Africa,” “Lee” for short. “Everyone knows Africa has chief’s palaces,” he told me, “and I loved Jerry Lee Lewis. And Lee Marvin too.” A thumbs-up appears on the left and right rear of America Man’s vehicle tailgate, framing the proverbial phrase: “Care not what others may say. Think about yourself and do the right thing.” Over the windshield on the front mantle he painted the words, “In God We Trust,” in between two packets of Lucky Strike cigarettes, a heart dividing the first two words from the second two. “Why did you sign Boafo “In God We Trust”?” I ask. No pause. “You know why!” he replied. Big smile (see Image 7.4). In November 1999, Queen Elizabeth visited Ghana to meet with President J. J. Rawlings. The royal entourage took over the La Palm Royal hotel. America Man went all out and really spiffed up the lorry, down to its impeccably shined overlarge whitewall tires, something rarely seen on even the most expensive cars in Accra and never on lorries. He got his photo into a glossy magazine spread about the visit. He wore his vintage USA t-shirt and bermudas; donned his Panama hat; carried his classic 1960s American transistor radio, decked the

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

139

vehicle with American, Ghanaian, and British flags; and offered himself as a symbol of intercultural friendship through the road. He posed together with his wife, Juliana Anyekai Adjei, whose U.S. flag headwrap, Keds, and Bermuda shorts took them back to suburban Maryland in the 1970s. “Why do you wear white gloves when you drive, America Man?” “Respect, Prof. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find out what it means to me,” he chants, in the Aretha Franklin cadence, switching off seamlessly to “If you don’t respect yourself ain’t nobody else . . . .” His voice trails off, allowing me to fill in the echo completion of the consequent song phrase from “Respect Yourself,” another soul-era hit by the Staple Singers. On most days America Man used Boafo to cart cinder-block bricks, made in the yard next to his house. He was a working lorry driver, industrious and proud. Then there was an accident in 2004 that left him with a broken leg and other wounds, destroyed the lorry’s wooden shell, and otherwise severely damaged his vehicle. Juliana nursed him back to health. “Each day,” he told me, “I sat outside next to my painting of President Kennedy and remembered the stories of how his back pained him so. It helped me gain my strength again. By the grace of God I recovered.” “Your Mouth Is Your Lorry! In God We Trust!” Just before I left Accra for New York in April 2008 to give the Annette Weiner lecture, Nii Yemo arrived with a bulge in his camera bag: “Prof, I brought you something. A tsolorley souvenir made for you by Odoi Perkoh, AlHaji’s son. He’s the one who makes them for the grand hotels; you can see them at Golden Tulip or La Palm or Novotel. He was so happy when he heard about Por Por’s big royalty money. So he wanted you to have something back. It’s a special one, Prof, because you Americans trust in God to bring you money. This one is your yellow cab, it brings good money like the tro tros, so it is called “In God We Trust.” You know that is why we Ghanaians love your American money, because it says that you trust God. Did America Man tell you that too?” “Well not every American who works for their money believes in that. I mean it’s not really a literal expression, Nii Yemo.” “Oh yes,” he continued, “of course, but it is like what we inscribe on our tro tros, something that is a good memory to inspire us in our work. ‘In God We Trust.’ Me, I don’t go to church but I like the sound of ‘In God We Trust’ very much. So I enjoy seeing it on the American money, like I enjoy seeing ‘Ben Hur’ on a tro tro. “Prof, you will be receiving money when you next go to America?” “Yes, for my work, lecturing.”

140

Language and Materiality

“Ona! You see! Your mouth is your lorry. They will pay to listen. Tell them about ‘In God We Trust.’ These vehicles are wealth to drivers like teaching is wealth to you. Onu! You hear! This is why ‘In God We Trust’ is a good tsolorley for you, Prof! Drive it well!! Tell them!! Eh-heeh!!” “What about ‘Cool Running,’” I ask, referring to the inscription on the souvenir vehicle’s tailgate. “Oh!! ‘Cool Running.’ You know, America is soo cool, everything is cool from America. Miles Davis! ‘The Birth of the Cool.’ Cool, man, cool!” He cannot stop laughing. Finally he does. “Ona! You see Prof. Dodge introduced ‘Cool Running’ in the years before independence, that is what they called their special engine, ‘cool running.’ We loved the Dodge, we loved the cool running motor vehicles. America is ‘Cool Running.’” Nii Yemo knows about American cool. He is typically dressed in Keds, Levis, a photographer’s vest over a tennis or t-shirt, and big aviator sunglasses. One of his nicknames is “Flick,” and he rides a motorcycle. His favorite film and tro tro name is Rebel without a Cause. But he says he got cool when he started spelling Africa with a “k.” When we met in 2005 Nii Yemo told me that he became a photographer in 1986. Before that he had a contract job supervising air conditioning repairs for the U.S. Embassy in Accra, beginning in 1970. He started with the U.S. Embassy crowd about the same time that his father was a chauffeur driver there, in the retirement job he held until his death in 1973. “Tell me about working for the Americans in those days.” “Prof, you see, that was something else-o. Because in the days of President Ford we got a wonderful surprise. Yes. Shirley Temple Black. She was the Embassy boss from America. Shirley Temple Black. Oh how we loved her! She came from the movies all the way to Accra! We loved the American movies so of course we loved Shirley Temple Black. And her husband too. He was very relaxed, going around town in his shorts! “So, you see, Shirley Temple Black had a daughter. Maybe she was about twenty. And she had a place of her own at the residence. So my assistant and I we were called one day to go there to fix up her air conditioning. And we had to take up the rug around the air conditioner. And there we found that this daughter had hidden a small packet of wee (marijuana). As soon as I smelled it I said to my mate, ‘Oh, the girl is buying a very bad wee. She will be sick!’ And I gave him some coins to go and come with some proper ganja. Later I finished the work and put the new packet there in the same place for her. Then I told my mate, ‘She will like this more-o. I didn’t want her to be scared and think she was being set up so just as soon as I spotted her around the grounds I went to say, ‘Don’t worry, it was only me, Nunu, who took care of you.’ So we became friends and from then on she always asked me and my boys to look after her wee. She was a real smoker, Prof, she was one of us. I wonder what has become

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

141

of her. We never heard from her again after your Henry Kissinger sacked her mother. Her name was Lori but we called her ‘California Dreaming.’” “What happened in 1986?” “Prof, do you know the story of Sharon Scranage and the CIA in Ghana in Ronald Reagan’s time, when the US was trying to overthrow President Rawlings?” “A little. Wasn’t Scranage the black American CIA agent jailed for passing classified information to her Ghanaian boyfriend, an intelligence officer?” “Correct. His name was Michael Soussoudis, a cousin of Rawlings. After the Americans trapped and arrested them both in the US, they exchanged him back for some CIA agents arrested here, ones who were exposed by Scranage. It was a real mess. So some months later we still knew that this CIA business was not finished. You were bombing Libya so the ambassador wasn’t around. Running the place was a new man named Kile, Robert Kile, Robert Lee Kile. He was the admin officer but he was all CIA. The word was around town. And he was a thief. He thought me and my boys were stupid. In fact, he had a business with a Lebanese man called ‘The Colonel’ (a pseudonym) who lived here in Nima near your place. He ordered containers of air conditioning and refrigeration equipment, all kinds of things for the Embassy. But the containers were never brought to me for inventory. They went to The Colonel who sold them and split the money with Kile. I hated him. So I organized all my boys to join me and expose him and all his theft and CIA business going on in our area. He was sacked. But at the beginning of 1986 they sacked me too and then eighteen more of us.” “How did that get you into photography?” “I’m coming with that. Ona, you see, after sixteen years’ work they gave me a sixty dollar severance. I borrowed another ten from my brother and bought a Canon T50 off an Embassy man who was leaving for a different posting. From there I became a photographer. So Prof, bring us some malt, so we can drink to Ronald Reagan and the CIA, because without them we might not be working together as we are today!” A quick internet trip to Wikipedia as we spoke told us that Sharon Scranage remains the only person convicted of breaking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. She pleaded guilty to three of eighteen charges, got a five-year sentence reduced to two, and was incarcerated for eighteen months. I stopped short of asking Nii Yemo if he knew the names Valerie Plame and Karl Rove.2 “Nii Yemo, in America I am speaking at New York University in the memory of a friend named Annette Weiner. Like her I studied in Papua New Guinea. Like her I studied funerals. Like her I saw how the things people give and the things they say carry into the future. Like her I saw how memory and reputation live in things like cloth or statues, songs or stories. I would like to leave this ‘In God We Trust’ model tro tro there in a study room dedicated to her memory.”

142

Language and Materiality

“Of course! You see! ‘In God We Trust.’ ‘Cool Running.’ America is well known to us. Leave the tro tro with them Prof. We will help honor your friend’s memory. Onu! You hear! In return they will feel moved to buy Por Por’s CD.” So is a voice any less material than a lorry? Is the musical use of an old lorry horn any less a smelting down than transforming and circulating reputations in mantleboards and tailgates, names, and stories? I think that Annette Weiner got it right about energetics, about the dynamic interplay between transience, durability, and permanence – and also about guardianship often trumping ownership, with sentiment distinctively pervading materialities of all kinds. The Por Por story is layered as thick with all of this as any tale from the Trobriand Islands or Papua New Guinea rainforest. It is a story about how sound and voice have no less profound materiality than a lorry’s rear-view mirror. Like the durability and permanence of physical material objects, sound rematerializes in echoic hearings, in repetitions, and in multiple mediations of technologies of recording and sampling. What makes sound distinctive is the way its materiality breathes in the elegant ephemerality of now it’s here, now it’s gone, and then – now it’s back. “Ona! you see! Your mouth is your lorry! They will pay to listen. Tell them about ‘In God We Trust.’ These vehicles are wealth to drivers like teaching is wealth to you. Onu! You hear? This is why ‘In God We Trust’ is a good tsolorley for you, Prof! Drive it well!! Tell them!! Eh-heeh!!” N OT E S 1. My anthropological linguistics professor, C. F. (“Carl”) Voegelin, told me the “TAke the CAke” story in 1972 when I was a graduate student at Indiana University, reading Jakobson’s works on poetics for the first time. 2. “Ghana Expels Four US Officials; State Department Threatens Aid Halt,” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1985; Plame 2007; the URL we viewed is http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Scranage.

REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Feld, Steven. 2009. A Por Por Funeral for Ashirifie. DVD. Santa Fe: VoxLox. 2012a. Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2012b. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Third and Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, with a new Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 12–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

“Your Mouth Is Your Lorry!"

143

Feld, Steven and Aaron Fox. 1994. “Music and Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology 23:25–53. Feld, Steven, Aaron Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels. 2004. “Vocal Anthropology.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 321–345. London: Blackwell. Jakobson Roman. 1980. Selected Writings Volume 3: The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry. Edited by Stephen Rudy. The Hague: Mouton. 1985. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Edited by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. La Drivers Union Por Por Group. 2007. Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana. CD. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Mitchell, Joni. 1979. Mingus. LP. New York: Asylum. Myers, Fred, ed. 2002. The Empire of Things. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Plame, Valerie. 2007. Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. New York: Simon and Shuster. Sakakeeny, Matt. 2013. Roll with It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

8

Transduction in Religious Discourse: Vocalization and Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices Patrick Eisenlohr

In this chapter, I engage with issues of vocalization and transduction as one of the key dimensions of the materiality of language. The transformation of discourse from one material state to another through the use of transducers that are at the core of all types of media technology is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Here I focus on how the processes of transduction at the heart of sound reproduction technology generate the sonic presence of a reciting voice in another setting. At the same time, such transductions are also the subject of complex social and cultural valuations that are closely tied to assumptions about the nature of the media apparatuses in question. In this chapter I address the issue of religious language, with an emphasis on the vocalization of religious discourse. I pay attention to the ways in which discourse in settings taken to be religious can shift between different modalities of materiality through the work of transducers. Such shifts in turn can become central to the spiritual practices involved. Here, the work of transducing discourse is inseparable from religiously grounded notions about language, especially the dimension of voice and its role in particular processes of religious interaction and mediation. The analysis shows that transduction is not just an important issue for languagerelated issues of media anthropology in a narrower sense. More broadly, the question of the materiality of language is intrinsically tied to the issue of transduction, because of its pivotal role in the social circulation of discourse. The theme of materiality has drawn increasing attention across a broader spectrum of the social sciences and the humanities in recent years (Hull 2012; Ingold 2007; Keane 2005; Latour 2005; Miller 1987, 2005). An important source of this interest is a growing intellectual dissatisfaction with the paradigm of hylomorphism, also among anthropologists (Ingold 2007, 2012). The hylomorphic model has dominated European thinking about the material since Aristotle and has tended to relegate it to passive, inert roles. According to this metaphysics, the universe contains an opposition between matter (hyle) and form (morphe). Entities and objects in the universe are the result of the bringing together of matter and form. Form needs matter to become actualized, while 144

Transduction in Religious Discourse

145

matter is essentially passive and noncreative, molded into definite shapes from the outside, by the imposition of preexisting forms. More specifically, humans create objects, things, and other entities with material dimensions by subjecting “raw,” “brute” materiality to the agency of often abstract and mental forms that account for the shape and organization of what is being created. The hylomorphic model of creation has been enormously influential in the scholarly understanding of many fields of human activity, such as material culture and the making of artifacts, where human agency has often been located in the application of such mental forms to inert matter. According to this model, materiality is ultimately of little consequence for cultural creativity (see Ingold 2012 for a critical discussion). More recently, alternative accounts of the creation of new entities, according to which forms are ever emergent in processes of creation, rather than the result of the imposition of preexisting mental forms, have drawn attention in the humanities. Perhaps the most significant instance of such a reconsideration of how processes of creation unfold is the systematic critique of hylomorphism formulated by Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989), first elaborated in his 1964 thesis. According to Simondon, processes of creation should not be taken to be the result of “raw” matter being shaped by preexisting forms, mental or otherwise, but as processes of “individuation” in which forms arise out of transformations of materials that occur when two or more elements in an inchoate, “pre-individual” milieu interact (Simondon 1992 [1964]). Such a “pre-individual” milieu is also what Simondon calls “metastable,” because it contains unresolved tensions and therefore at the same time energy (ibid.: 302). The emergence of new entities from such a milieu is a way to temporally resolve these tensions, in a process that Simondon calls “transduction” (ibid.: 313). One example of this is the appearance and growth of a crystal in its mother-water, but Simondon extends this model of ontogenesis to account for the emergence of new entities or “individuals” from interactions within “pre-individual” milieus across a broad range of physical, biological, and human domains, including social and psychological phenomena. For example, for Simondon the appearance and growth of social groups can be understood as a process of individuation effected by transduction. For any discussion of the materiality of language it is highly relevant that the logic of hylomorphism has also profoundly shaped the analysis of language. One result has been the frequent denial of the significance of materiality in language as one of the key human activities. This is evident in the notion that language comes about by the imposition of mental forms on matter, in this case perceived variations of air pressure (sound waves). In the modern study of language, and of semiotics more generally, this assumption is most prominent in Saussure’s formulation of the arbitrary sign, where the particularities of the sonic material of linguistic signs are ultimately of no consequence for the

146

Language and Materiality

meanings expressed. In the Saussurean tradition of semiology, semiotics and materiality appear to be distinct domains, because the structures and systems that it takes to be the core of language are considered to be mental phenomena (for a related discussion, see Irvine, this volume). Such an opposition between materiality and semiotics would be rejected by many contemporary linguistic anthropologists, who tend to follow Peirce’s perspective that there is no semiotics without materiality (Keane 2003; Nakassis 2013: 400–401). This is clearly evident in the Peircean categories of iconicity and indexicality, which refer to sign relationships based on qualitative similarity, and contiguity or causality, respectively. But also Peirce’s semiotics draws hylomorphic metaphysical distinctions. Peirce distinguished between what he called Firstness, pure qualities in themselves (tones or qualisigns), and Secondness, actual, concretely existing phenomena with their physical forces located in space and time (the instances of which he called sinsigns or tokens). Firstness (such as the quality of being red) needs a Second (e.g., the substance of a particular berry) to actually come into existence; that is, Firstness needs materialization in a Second to exist.1 In another distinction recalling the separation of matter and form, relationships between instances of Secondness (tokens) are mediated by Thirdness; that is, regularities, laws, and mental representations (instances of which Peirce referred to as legisigns or types) (Peirce 1932b:142– 143 [2.243–2.246]).2 The mediation of concretely existing tokens through more abstract, conceptual types is also central to my discussion of entextualization and media ideologies in this chapter, because Mauritian Muslims evaluate particular poetic performances and the uses of sound reproduction technology by drawing on preexisting and widely circulating expectations and ideas about the poetic genres and the functioning of sound reproduction in question. The analysis of language in its sociocultural context often requires taking account of circulating categories of mediation that can be relatively autonomous from particular instances of linguistic performance, such as linguistic types, models of textuality, register, and genre, as well as language and semiotic ideologies, thereby committing the analyst to some measure of hylomorphic reasoning. I therefore do not claim that the Simondonian critique of hylomorphism usefully applies to language in its entirety. However, my argument is that doing justice to the material transformations in language I seek to capture with the notion of transduction requires a thorough rethinking of materiality, away from the familiar and pervasive dualism of matter and form. The processes of transduction I discuss in this chapter are perceptible phenomena that generate certain effects. These effects lie in making a domain that is normally removed from the experiential context in which the actors find themselves present. Transduction then brings about presence. Such presences provide above all an example of materiality that already has transformative effects without the imposition of

Transduction in Religious Discourse

147

mental forms. As I show, the effects of such presences more specifically lie in a rearrangement of the relationships between different domains, such as performative contexts of origin and the target context of performance, between divine and mundane realm, and in the Mauritian setting, between religious authorities located in other parts of the world and the Mauritian diaspora. Examining vocalization in an Islamic setting centered on the performance of devotional poetry, in this chapter I draw on the notion of transduction to demonstrate materiality as a creative and deeply consequential dimension of language. This goes beyond the familiar observation that language is inseparable from the material. Not even Saussure denied that linguistic signs needed to include material existence. The point is that, at least for some dimensions of language, language as a human activity does not operate through the imposition of mental forms on sonic matter, but material transformations linked to processes of transduction can themselves be generative of linguistic interaction with their attendant social consequences. Islam and Devotional Genres Among Mauritian Muslims, na’t is a popular genre of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad. These are verses and hymns of praise performed on important dates in the Islamic ritual calendar, as well as during auspicious events in people’s lives. They are the central component of religious speech events known as mahfil-e mawlud held on such occasions. Na’t has come to play an important role in sectarian differentiation among Mauritian Muslims. Mauritian Muslims are of Indian origin, comprising 17 percent of a total population of 1.2 million. The position of the genre in the production of sectarian differences closely resembles those found in similar debates in South Asia. In Mauritius, however, these debates are also connected to questions of religious authority in a diasporic location, where religious authenticity helps legitimize the place of Mauritians in the nation. Ever since independence in 1968, Mauritius has opted for a nation-building strategy eschewing homogenizing tendencies, officially emphasizing the origins of Mauritians in different parts of the world instead. Devotional practices such as na’t have a double character in Mauritius. On one hand, they are one of the manifestations of what in Mauritius is officially known as “ancestral culture,” where in the discourse on “ancestral culture” the terms culture and religion are often used interchangeably. Mauritius never had a precolonial population, and in its strategy of nation-building the nation is officially conceived as a diasporic mosaic. Consequently, the origins of Mauritians in other parts of the world are officially highlighted, and membership in the nation is best demonstrated through the cultivation of diasporic “ancestral cultures.” For Muslims, Islamic traditions are officially recognized as their

148

Language and Materiality

“ancestral culture” and, by extension, their claim to full cultural citizenship. Thus, the perceived authenticity of Islamic traditions pointing to origins and sources of authority outside Mauritius are of crucial importance in Mauritian multicultural politics, as is the question of who speaks for authentic Islam in Mauritius. One the other hand, na’t as a devotional genre is emblematic of the Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jama’at or Barelwi tradition, which probably still commands the following of most Mauritian Muslims, as well as the majority of Muslims in India and Pakistan. This reformist tradition originating in a late nineteenth-century colonial context distinguishes itself through its synthesis of Sufism and “ulemabased Islam” (Sanyal 1996). It emphasizes practices of intercession in which the Prophet or another Islamic authority such as a major Sufi saint is directly addressed for assistance and in order to accumulate spiritual merit (sawab). Opponents of the Ahl-e Sunnat tradition, such as the more purist school of Deoband or the Salafi-oriented Ahl-e hadith, generally reject such practices, arguing that they dilute the unicity of God, dangerously elevating human beings next to him. As such, the practice of na’t has come to be contested, and its proponents, being part of an increasingly well-informed Muslim public in Mauritius, have become ever more aware of the need to defend its legitimacy. Mauritian Muslims favoring the performance of na’t acknowledge that it is a delicate genre because of the danger that the exuberant praise showered on the Prophet may elevate him to a Godlike figure. Mauritian Muslims often consider themselves as living on the periphery of the Muslim world and are especially mindful of the authenticity and legitimacy of their ritual practices in their diasporic context. They are therefore concerned about reciting the “right” texts composed by important scholar-saints. But the textual content is not the only element Mauritian Muslims are mindful of in the recitation of na’t. The performative dimensions are equally important. That is, in the eyes of those Mauritian Muslims in favor of cultivating na’t, the style and vocalization of the recitation are of key significance for the practice to work as a means of spiritual intercession. The aesthetic qualities of the performance, especially its vocal dimensions, are crucial for distinguishing a successful from a failed performance. The concern about authentic Islamic practice in the diaspora also extends to the qualities of the reciting voice, which is a sensibility that can be traced to the paradigm of Qur’anic recitation. Sound reproduction technologies, in turn, are widely regarded as a means to safeguard and transmit correct recitational style, in a way that printed manuals of na’t text cannot. The latter have long been circulating widely in Mauritius. Since the 1980s, however, listening first to cassette tapes, later to audio CDs, and now also to sound files downloaded from the internet has become very popular. Recordings of na’t performances by accomplished na’t khwan (performers of na’t) from India and Pakistan, and also those of a few locally trained

Transduction in Religious Discourse

149

Mauritian na’t khwan, are widely treated as examples to emulate when holding a mahfil-e mawlud. My interlocutors often mentioned the model character of performative styles and vocal qualities of well-known na’t khwan when preparing for a mahfil-e mawlud on occasions such as the Prophet’s birthday or the birth or death anniversaries of major Sufi saints, weddings, moving into a new house, birth of a child, or passing important school exams. Discursive Devotion: Entextualization, Transposition, and Vocalization The performance of na’t can be understood as a process of entextualization, in which chunks of discourse are continuously lifted out of one context and reinserted in another. This perspective stresses the processual nature of textuality as a constant alternation between de- and recontextualization of discourse (Briggs and Bauman 1992). In the performance of na’t, Mauritian Muslims appropriate texts from previous contexts of performance and reinsert them in the performative context at hand. In the recitation of na’t, the goal is to reproduce tokens of a type (the authorized na’t genre) in new performative contexts, so they can be recognized as replications of previous tokens. The tokens are felt to be the “same” in relation to the semiotic type in question, despite the irreducible singularity of each performative event. There are two points in this process of entextualization that are particularly important for the success of the performance. First, the recontextualization of na’t involves a process of transposition. This means that the text is recontextualized in a way that points to its origins in another context elsewhere, thereby resulting in an authorizing effect. I hereby refer to Karl Bühler’s use of the term “transposition” (Versetzung), describing the creative insertion of a text into a new context in a way indicating the former´s origin in another spatial and temporal setting (Bühler 1965 [1934]: 134–140; Haviland 1996; Shoaps 2002). The target text features numerous deictic markers that point to a projected context of composition of the poetry by revered saint-scholars located in the past. These are primarily first-person personal deictics and verb forms agreeing with them, personal pronouns, and temporal deitics. In addition, there are numerous evidentials and locutives that have the effect of further personalizing the devotional discourse (see Eisenlohr, 2010, for a detailed analysis), indicating the stance of the poetry-composing saint-scholars and their religious authority. At the same time, the deitics and other personalization markers of the text are also ambiguous, precisely because na’t texts are often highly personal expressions of affection and attachment for the Prophet and are often personally addressed to him. In the act of recitation in a mahfil-e mawlud, the Mauritian performers therefore also take personal responsibility for the discourse uttered. The “I” of the devotional discourse

150

Language and Materiality

simultaneously points to the person of the composer in the assumed context of origin and his religious authority, as well as to the reciting performers in the Mauritian target contexts at hand. In Goffmanian terms, the performers of the target text inhabit the participant roles of animators of the text composed by scholar-saints of a higher religious authority (who inhabit the role of the composer or “ghostor”); however, because the performers at hand also take personal responsibility for the devotional discourse they recite, they also shift into the participant role of the sponsor or originator who is held accountable for what is being said (Goffman 1974: 517–520). The replication of the deictic structure of the origin text into the target text underlines the personal commitment to the spiritual authority that the saint-scholars stand for and that is also claimed by the Ahl-e Sunnat tradition. This replication also constitutes a diagrammatic enactment of the continuity of the spiritual tradition concerned, in which the authentic and faithful transmission of devotional discourse plays a signal role. Here, materiality as it is evident in the iconic and indexical dimensions of language turns out to be central for the efficacy of the recitation. Second, the qualitative regimentation of the recontextualized devotional discourse is significant because it additionally reinforces the commitment to religious authority, as well as the continuity of its tradition. This concerns especially the vocalization of devotional discourse. Mauritian Muslims consider qualities of the voice to be particularly important in the process of entextualizing na’t, which revolves not only around the transmission and repetition of “correct” texts but also around the reproduction of sonic tokens that in their perceived qualities conform to the desired and authorized generic type of na’t. My interlocutors frequently described the highly valued emotional vocal tone stirring others as a “clean” (prop) and beautiful (zoli) voice that “opens the heart” and that a na’t khwan should have in order to move the listeners toward deep feelings of love and attachment for the Prophet Muhammad in his performance. In the words of one of my informants, na’t performers should have a “soft voice that naturally comes from the heart of those who love the Prophet.” The link my informants drew between perceived qualities of the vocalization of discourse and a particular form of piety centered on being filled with love for the Prophet illustrates a more widespread phenomenon of linking qualities of the voice to subject positions or stances, described by linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists as “voice registers” (Mendoza-Denton 2011; Sicoli 2014; see also Harkness 2013). The importance of this voice-induced stance of piety for Mauritian Muslims who follow the Ahl-e Sunnat tradition explains their concern to preserve the singular qualities – or tones/qualisigns in semiotic terms (Peirce 1932b: 142) – of particular voices in the circulation and entextualization of na’t. This is in turn a chief reason for the eager adoption and domestication of sound reproduction technologies in the practice of na’t. Among Mauritian Muslims, the notion that sound reproduction technology –

Transduction in Religious Discourse

151

formerly audio cassettes and later audio CD and MP3 files downloaded from the internet – is uniquely suited for safeguarding qualities of the voice is very widespread. For many, such technologies have a unique capacity for the maintenance of sonic tokens across a chain of performative contexts. Authoritative recordings of na’t performances provide Mauritian Muslims who favor the cultivation of na’t with models to emulate, not just in terms of textual continuity but also of performative and vocal style. This concern is in alignment with a dominant Qur’anic paradigm in Islamic tradition, according to which recitation of scripture summons the divine presence, and as a consequence, the reciting voice is taken to be the site where God reveals himself (Messick 1993, 1997; Gade 2006). Sound Reproduction: Transduction and Remediation The mediated circulation of na’t with its sound reproduction-assisted process of entextualization of devotional discourse demonstrates the importance of embodied linguistic practice for devotional life among Mauritian Muslims. But beyond this general observation, the domestication of sound reproduction technologies into Mauritian Muslim religious practices raises the question of the materiality of language in more specific ways, especially by bringing up the issue of voice and its aesthetics (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012: 358–359; Harkness 2013). Above all, materiality appears as the issue of transduction from one material state to another (see Feld, Chapter 7, this volume). I here draw on Webb Keane’s recent discussion of “spirit writing” as a means of transducing discourse into different material modalities (Keane 2013). Keane is influenced by Silverstein’s formulation of transduction (Silverstein 2003), but in contrast to Silverstein, who deploys the term to describe the rendering of indexical relationships in another language, Keane focuses on material transformations of religious discourse. In a related way, the notion of transduction has also been recently taken up in anthropological work on religion and media (Engelke 2011). Above all, my use of the term is inspired by its long-standing currency in media studies, from the insight that the workings of media are based on the operations of transducers, devices that convert variations in energy in a physical medium into corresponding variations in another physical medium (compare Helmreich 2007). Sound has an especially close relationship with transduction. In the performance of na’t, transduction appears to be relevant in at least two ways. First, the theme of the qualitative integrity of discourse across different instances of entextualization of na’t that appears to be so important for indexing personal commitment to and continuity of the religious tradition in question brings into play the opposition of vocal performance and writing. As I have explained, the attraction of sound reproduction technology lies in its

152

Language and Materiality

perceived ability to faithfully reproduce sonic tokens that help maintain the desired forms of vocalization of na’t in performance. From the perspective of Mauritian Muslims who advocate the performance of na’t, written na’t texts do not afford this possibility. That is, those engaged in the practice of na’t tend to avoid the transduction of the sonic dimensions of discourse to writing, because they consider the sonic dimensions as essential to the success of the performance. The transduction to a visually perceivable medium such as writing would reduce the vocal performance mainly to its textual content, which is insufficient for the task of religious mediation and intercession aimed at in the performance of na’t. Although written collections of na’t have long been in circulation and use in Mauritius, from such a perspective, writing should be used as an aide memoire only, and otherwise bypassed as much as possible in the process of transmission and entextualization. Second, sound reproduction as a medium also involves the transduction of sound waves – that is, variations in air pressure – into a different material modality: “modern technologies of sound reproduction use devices called transducers, which turn sound into something else and that something else back into sound. All sound reproduction technologies work through the use of transducers” (Sterne 2003: 22, emphasis in original). That is, the variations in air pressure comprising the sonic tokens of the vocal performances recorded are transduced into variations in electrical voltage or current by a microphone, then into a sequence of numbers, and eventually into tiny plastic bumps of different sizes on a CD; those bumps then are read by an optical device emitting electronic signals encoding the sequence of numbers. These signals in turn undergo a process of decoding and digital-to-analog conversion, producing variations in electrical current or voltage from which a more or less accurate replication of a sonic token is reproduced. While transduction as a physical process, of course, applies to all sonic manifestations of language such as speaking and hearing – the production of vocal sound through the lungs and the laryngeal tract, as well as the perception of sound through the hearing apparatus and other parts of the body all function through processes of transduction – my concern here is transduction that involves the use of sound reproduction technology. Let us look at the sequence of transductions that enable the conversion of sound into variations in electrical voltage or current through a microphone, with an analog-to-digital converter transducing the electrical signal into sequences of zeros and ones, the conversion of those numbers into tiny plastic bumps on a polycarbonate disc, reflections of a laser beam reading the bumps whose modulations read off by a photodiode reveal the sequence of zeros and ones, and digital-to-analog conversion producing variations in electrical voltage or current that are finally turned into sound waves again. We are confronted with a stunning complexity of material transformations of voice that in turn depend on a large infrastructure of electricity generation and transport, institutions of

Transduction in Religious Discourse

153

knowledge production, and manufacturing networks for all components of the technical system of sound reproduction that involve the use of audio CDs. How do these complex transductions from one material state to another feature in Mauritian Muslims’ uses of sound reproduction in devotional context? First of all, they bring about the perceptible presence of a voice in a setting that is often at a considerable remove from both the setting of the vocal performance and its divinely inspired context. More to the point, this presence is a direct result of the processes of transduction at work here. In a Simondonian sense, such transduction is also an individuation that brings together material objects and forces in such a way that the generation of something new is the result – namely, the perceived presence of the voice with its social consequences. Since the complex sequences of transduction at play here create the presence of a voice in another spatiotemporal context, they have the potential to support particular notions about what sound reproduction is and does. In other words, the transducively effected vocal presence comes along with certain affordances for media ideologies or politically and culturally charged notions of what certain media are and do (Gershon 2010; Eisenlohr 2004: 25), which are very consequential for religious practices such as the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad. Mauritian Muslims often regard sound reproduction as the most faithful means of preserving and storing devotional performances in their richness and qualitative complexity. However, the issue of faithful continuity that religious practitioners often stress across a range of domains, such as the reciting voice, the religious tradition in question, and their personal commitment to that tradition, appears to be in tension with the multiple and drastic material transformations and transductions that sound reproduction actually involves. This poses the question of how this tension is addressed. How does this tension feature in uses of sound reproduction in circulating the na’t genre and for the modeling of new performances? Interestingly, Mauritian Muslims engaged in the practice of na’t sideline the material complexity of the medium when pinning their hopes for the seamless transmission of vocalization of devotional discourse on sound reproduction technologies. This raises the role of underlying assumptions about particular media, here in a religious context, and of questions such as how such media work, who controls its channels, and what is being done and delivered by them. My Mauritian interlocutors emphasized that sound reproduction technologies convey, if working properly, a sense of witnessing a performance as if “live and direct,” which in turn enabled them to derive guidance from it. In the words of a teacher in his late twenties, “it is like the experience of being there, and listen to na’t directly.” It appears that such a notion of sound reproduction as a perfectly functioning, and therefore “vanishing,” medium (Sterne 2003) elides the multiple material transductions and their dependence on a large and multifaceted social and technological infrastructure. Transduction’s

154

Language and Materiality

material complexity of enormous extent literally disappears from awareness in the desire to find a technical solution for the problem of qualitative integrity of devotional recitation that plays such a great role in performances of commitment and continuity in this religious tradition. The fact that using sound reproduction technology makes a voice present and perceptible to all, regardless of how this process is interpreted, supports the elision of transduction’s complexity. As perception is directed at the presence of the voice, such presence then easily occludes other material dimensions of sound reproduction, such as the technical apparatus and infrastructure generating such sonic presence. The question of the materiality of language is thus closely linked to the question of transduction. My focus on language materiality as transduction, whether in the relationship between written and spoken language or in uses of sound reproduction, highlights that the circulation of discourse is a media question, inseparably tied to the materiality of language making such circulation possible. We could say that language as a medium of sociocultural life involves the work of transduction of one material modality to another. What is being made of these transductions? What is their significance? To begin to answer the question one needs to reiterate that transduction is foremost about material presence and its perception. However, it is clear that Mauritian Muslims do interpret uses of sound reproduction, including the transductions they involve in particular ways, drawing on semiotic ideologies (Keane 2003), such as in my earlier example of the logocentric notion that voice is a superior and more authentic means of transmitting devotional discourse than writing. Also, more specifically, media ideologies appear to be of great relevance for understanding the work of transduction. Here, the sense that the complex material transductions and vast infrastructure that sound reproduction technology involves become invisible, in the search for a “vanishing medium” that erases its own traces, is integral to the domestication of sound reproduction technology into the religious practices of Mauritian Muslims. Gaps, Media, and Transductions It is important to consider the various kinds of gaps that transduction and technological mediation help bridge. By mediation, I mean the objects or processes that link persons, concepts, or different social formations across qualitative, temporal, or spatial gaps. Language as a form of embodied interaction is one of the foremost forms of social mediation in this general sense. Its work of mediation involves processes of material transduction that in my example bring about the sonic presence of a voice. In this context, it is worthwhile to examine more closely the nature of the gaps being bridged by language as a practice of social mediation and by its material dimensions, including transductively produced sonic presence.

Transduction in Religious Discourse

155

In my example of the media-assisted circulation of devotional poetry among Mauritian Muslims, both “live” performative events and listening to na’t recordings on audio CDs address the absence of the original recitation and its divinely inspired context. The generated presence of the recitation then rearranges the relationships between this divinely loaded setting and the context of the performance at hand. This perceptible presence also becomes subject to interpretation, acquiring semiotic values that build on the affordances of the sonic presence of the voice. Sonic presence itself, in combination with the significance it acquires, brings about a narrowing of the gap between the two domains. That is, in my example, sonic transduction works as a form of mediating such gaps in a double way: by generating sonic presence that provides a ground for communicative processes and by providing affordances for interpreting the very act of transduction in ways that connect to larger religious contexts and cosmologies. Given that the performance of na’t revolves around the tension between absence and presence of the original recitation, what else can be said about the nature of this gap in the performance of na’t? First, the stark difference in agentive qualities is one of the central characteristics of the gap. Na’t poetry is most prestigious and authoritative if it can be traced back to revered saint-poets who composed the texts in moments of divine presence and inspiration. The agentive capacities of the performers of the target text are of a different kind, lacking the same privileged capabilities of interaction with the divine (compare Keane 2013). As I indicated earlier, in the act of performance they inhabit the participant roles of animators, who nevertheless also take personal responsibility for the poetic discourse uttered, because it often personally addresses the Prophet. That is, the effectiveness of the performance as an act of intercession with the divine also hinges on the provisionary merging of the participant roles of animator and sponsor or originator and, by implication, also that of composer. This merger of participant roles is enabled by a key feature of the semiotic dimension of this overcoming of a gap: the fact that the text the recitation enounces displays the deictic structure of the target text performed. As I pointed out, the latter is regimented in such a way that it appears as an iconic replication of the divinely inspired context of the poetry’s origin. The text features the semiotic structure of an indexical icon (the image-like replication of the structure of deictic marking) of this highly valued divine context, which works as a means to bridge the gap that opens up in the absence of the text of origin and its divine dimensions. The replication of the deictic structure of the text of origin and the qualitative integrity of its vocal reanimation in the target text regulate the event’s participant roles in such a way that they mitigate the stark differences in agentive capacity that constitute the gap to be overcome. In a somewhat less salient way, the gap also involves ontological differences between the performative context of origin and the target text. While

156

Language and Materiality

the assumed composers of authoritative na’t poetry and the poetry’s reciters in present-day Mauritius are both human beings in this world, the former are scholar-saints who are in a much closer relationship with the divine, this being the condition of possibility for their composition of the most accomplished na’t. Actually, according to the Ahl-e Sunnat tradition, its founder Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi (1856–1921) composed his most powerful na’t in moments when the Prophet appeared before him, in a setting marked and saturated by divine presence. Unlike in the examples of “spirit writing” discussed by Webb Keane where the materialization of language helps mediate the gap between this world and a clearly separate, spiritual and imperceptible world (Keane 2013), the ontological difference is more of a gradual kind, but nevertheless clearly relevant. The entextualization of na’t in the target context also helps establish a link to a context of origin marked by the presence of the divine. Another gap to be bridged in the successful performance of na’t is the diasporic gap that separates Mauritian Muslims not just from the Indian lands of their immigrating ancestors but above all from sites of religious authority located in India and elsewhere. The latter also, of course, include the sites of the divinely inspired contexts of origin of the poetry, such as those found in the life of Ahmad Reza Khan Barelwi. The replication of the deictic structure of the text of origin and the qualitative regimentation of its vocalization – that is, the indexical iconic structure of the target text – also contribute to a closing of the gap between Mauritian Muslims of Indian origin and South Asian sites of religious authority. This is very significant in a diasporic context where Mauritian Muslims often consider themselves to be inhabiting the periphery of the Muslim world and are especially sensitive to the authenticity and correctness of their ritual practices (Eisenlohr 2006b). As mentioned earlier, the diasporic gap is not just relevant for questions of religious authority in a narrower sense but also is one of the chief themes of Mauritian multicultural politics and nation-building, in which the claiming of a diasporic origin outside Mauritius on primarily religious grounds is one of the principal means of legitimizing membership in the nation. Other religious groups in Mauritius, such as Hindus, have also developed ritual practices to address this gap, in a process of “diasporic calibration” (Eisenlohr 2006a: 245–265). Turning to the circulation of na’t through sound reproduction technologies, Mauritian Muslims value sound recordings of the poetry mainly because of the model character of the vocalization of the devotional discourse they can listen to on audio CDs. Uses of sound reproduction technology therefore assist in the task of maintaining qualitative integrity of the performed discourse, thus helping authenticate the target texts. That is, using sound reproduction brings about sonic presences, but the social actors involved treat these presences not as neutral, but rather as value laden. Given the importance of tracing na’t to an authoritative source, this media technology is also deployed in the attempt to

Transduction in Religious Discourse

157

bridge the various kinds of gaps between origin and target text as a perceived means of faithful transmission of na’t across a wide range of entextualizations. It circulates authoritative recordings of accomplished na’t khwan from context to context, across temporal and spatial gaps, and across national and regional borders. In reproducing prior authoritative performances with model character while using sound reproduction technologies, Mauritian Muslims support the process of deictically grounding the target performance in the text of origin, pointing to its divinely inspired creators, and appropriate the latters’ devotional discourse for personally addressing the Prophet. It thus appears that sound reproduction technology assists in bridging the multiple gaps of agentive capacity, ontological status, and diasporic remove that the performance of na’t seeks to overcome. But the same material qualities that make sound reproduction technology attractive to Mauritian Muslims as it enables the seemingly faithful reproduction of voice qualities also make the technological mediation of na’t subject to uncertainties. Because sound reproduction technology facilitates the circulation of devotional discourse with its “correct” modes of vocalization across a broad range of contexts, it also opens up the possibility of inappropriate recontextualizations. It may thus encourage the insertion of na’t into contexts that stand in a problematic relationship with the ideas of embodied piety that the proponents of na’t seek to achieve through its performance. One example often mentioned by my Mauritian Muslim interlocutors is the performance of na’t in Hindi films, such as the classic Mughal-e azam (Asif 2005; cf. Asani 1995: 182). Here, the devotional poetry that often expresses feelings of longing and affection for the Prophet is reinserted in plots that center on romantic love. The perceived dangers of the Hindi cinema are not only present in the mediaenabled traveling of the poetry into morally inappropriate contexts. In addition, the musical styles and aesthetics of Hindi film entertainment can affect the way na’t is recited in mahfil-e mawlud. Even though the recitation of na’t also clearly follows what musicologists would describe as musical movements and dynamics, including the use of melody, most Mauritian Muslims do not include such performances in their understanding of the category “music.”3 The observation that some Mauritian Muslims are led to recite na’t to the tunes of films songs they frequently listen to is of great concern to established na’t khwan and others who have advocated the use of sound recordings of performances by accomplished na’t khwan as a means of guidance on these grounds. Nevertheless, others have no objections to reciting na’t “film style” (filmi taraz) and even advocate its accompaniment by musical instruments such as the daf, a drum that also resembles the ravan. The latter plays an emblematic role in Mauritian séga music whose performance is closely linked to the Mauritian Creole identity of Christians predominantly tracing their ancestry to African and Malagasy slaves. In Mauritius, as in many other places, uses of sound reproduction

158

Language and Materiality

technology in their everyday contexts are closely linked to musical and dance entertainment, which some Muslims regard as a danger, even though they do not deny the beneficial uses of sound reproduction technology in circulating devotional poetry. This shows how in the case of na’t performances, the boundary between legitimate religion and nonreligion is not so much a matter of doctrine and preexisting beliefs, but is largely shaped by the aesthetics of performance (compare Tambar 2010). These in turn are inseparable from the materiality of the circulation of discourse. The ambivalent attitudes to uses of sound reproduction in the circulation of na’t stem from the perceived danger that styles of performance influenced by “Bollywood” entertainment undermine the pious performance and its hoped-for benefits, and ultimately point to the vicissitudes that the materiality of its circulation brings about. Conclusion In this chapter, I presented a semiotic analysis of religious performance that takes seriously the sonic transductions that the performance involves. The focus here was on transduction as a material and generative process that brings separate realms into relation with each other. I argued that properly accounting for this process requires a rethinking of materiality, overcoming the deep-seated dualism of matter and form. I also sought to show that the materiality of language is a media question as well, involving at least two different modalities (see also Cavanaugh, Chapter 6, this volume). On the one hand, media – sound reproduction in my example – work as machines of transduction, enabling the social circulation of discourse, converting discursive tokens into different material states, and creating sonic presences in new settings. Closely connected to the dynamics of sonic transduction and its presences, we are also confronted with the account of media as being “in the middle” or “in-between” something and the question of their perceptible presence. This in turn draws attention to the dialectics between mediation and immediacy; that is, the oscillation of the medium between states of high perceptibility and its disappearance in states of expected and smooth functioning (Bolter and Grusin 1999; Eisenlohr 2009). In my discussion of Mauritian Muslim devotional practices and their medial circulation, the latter state appears in the assessment of sound reproduction technology as a “vanishing medium,” seemingly providing “direct” access to valued stylistic renderings of na’t and the qualitative regimentation of their vocalization. This perspective stands in stark contrast to the actual sequences of material transductions that enable the effect of witnessing authoritative performances as “live and direct.” Rather than a vanishing medium yielding to desires for immediacy, the apparatus of mediation reveals itself to be highly complex and based on a vast material and technical infrastructure, revolving around relationships of transduction of energy from one material state to another. Nevertheless, a

Transduction in Religious Discourse

159

perceptual focus on the presences generated by media that reproduce sound often encourages the occlusion and withdrawal of media apparatuses. Materiality as transduction as the generation of sonic presence is the core of the media-enabled processes of social circulation of language I discussed. But it seems that such materiality of discourse, irreducible as it is, is nevertheless subject to very different states of awareness (compare Silverstein 2001[1981]) and that there are contexts where its presence is sidelined. More precisely, some aspects of language materiality may overshadow others to such a degree that the latter may seemingly disappear. Such is often the case when the sonic presence of a voice occludes the technical apparatuses and infrastructures where such transduction occurs.

N OT E S 1 “The mode of being of the quality is that of Firstness. That is to say, it is a possibility. It is related to the matter accidentally; and this relation does not change the quality at all, except that it imparts existence, that is to say, this very relation of inherence, to it. But the matter, on the other hand, has no being at all except the being a subject of qualities. This relation of really having qualities constitutes its existence” (Peirce 1932a:279 [1.527]). 2 According to Peirce, not only qualisigns but also sinsigns and legisigns necessarily contain firstness, because the latter two need to involve one or more qualisigns. In addition, legisigns also require sinsigns, in this case replicas, because they usually occur in the form of an instance of their application (Peirce 1932b:142–143 [2.243– 2.246]). 3 Such a normatively loaded distinction between music and nonmusic is also well known from Muslim debates about the recitation of the Qur’an. An important example of this is the long-standing “sama” polemic about the relationship between musical arts and Qur’an recitation, driven by a “strong suspicion on the part of many Muslims that the recognized power of music is somehow antithetical to the ideals of Islam” (Nelson 2001:32). See the commentary by Faudree in this volume for a broader discussion of this relationship.

REFERENCES Asani, Ali. 1995. “In Praise of Muhammad: Sindhi and Urdu poems.” In Religions of India in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, 159–186. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Asif, K., dir. 2005[1960]. Mughal-e Azam. 173 min. UTV Motion Pictures. Mumbai. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Briggs, Charles, and Richard Bauman. 1992. “Genre, Intertextuality and Social Power.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2): 131–172. Bühler, Karl. 1965 [1934]. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: G. Fischer.

160

Language and Materiality

Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2004. “Language Revitalization and New Technologies: Cultures of Electronic Mediation and the Refiguring of Communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 21–45 2006a. Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2006b. “As Makkah Is Sweet and Beloved, so Is Madina: Islam, Devotional Genres and Electronic Mediation in Mauritius.” American Ethnologist 33(2): 230–245. 2009. “Technologies of the Spirit: Devotional Islam, Sound Reproduction, and the Dialectics of Mediation and Immediacy in Mauritius.” Anthropological Theory 9(3): 273–296. 2010. “Materialities of Entextualization: The Domestication of Sound Reproduction in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(2): 314–333. Engelke, Matthew. 2011. “Response to Charles Hirschkind: Religion and Transduction.” Social Anthropology 19(1): 97–102. Gade, Anna M. 2006. “Recitation.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an, edited by Andrew Rippin, 481–493. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Gershon, Ilana. 2010. “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(2): 283–293. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay in the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Harkness, Nicholas. 2013. Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haviland, John. 1996. “Projections, Transpositions and Relativity.” In Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, edited by John Gumperz and Stephen Levinson, 271–323. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helmreich, Stefan. 2007. “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography.” American Ethnologist 34(4): 621–641. Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ingold, Tim. 2007. “Materials against Materiality.” Archeological Dialogues 14(1): 1– 19. 2012. “Toward an Ecology of Materials. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 427– 442. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language & Communication 23: 409–425. 2005. “Signs are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things.” In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 182–205. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2013. “On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19: 1–17. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2011. “The Semiotic Hitchhiker’s Guide to Creaky Voice: Circulation and Gendered Hardcore in a Chicana/o Gang Persona.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(2): 261–280.

Transduction in Religious Discourse

161

Messick, Brinkley. 1993. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997. “Genealogies of Reading and the Scholarly Cultures of Islam.” In Cultures of Scholarship, edited by S. C. Humphreys, 387–412. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Miller, Daniel. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell. 2005. “Materiality: An Introduction.” In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 1–50. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nakassis, Constantine V. 2013. “Materiality, Materialization.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 399–406. Nelson, Kristina. 2001. The Art of Reciting the Qur’an. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1932a. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol I. Elements of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1932b. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Volume II: Elements of Logic. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sanyal, Usha. 1996. Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza Khan Barelwi and His Movement (1870–1920). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shankar, Shalini and Jillian Cavanaugh. 2012. “Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:355–369. Shoaps, Robin A. 2002. ““Pray earnestly”: The Textual Construction of Personal Involvement in Pentecostal Prayer and Song.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12(1): 34–71. Sicoli, Mark A. 2014. “Voice Registers.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Second Edition, edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, 2nd ed., 105–126. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Silverstein, Michael. 2001 [1981]. “The Limits of Awareness.” In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 382–401. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2003. “Translation, Transduction, Transformation: Skating “Glossando’ on Thin Semiotic Ice.” In Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology, edited by P. G. Rubel and A Rosman, 75–105. Oxford: Berg. Simondon, Gilbert. 1964. L’individu et Sa Genèse Physico-Biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1992 [1964]. “The Genesis of the Individual.” In Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 297–319. New York: Zone. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tambar, Kabir. 2010. “The Aesthetics of Public Visibility. Alevi Semah and the Paradoxes of Pluralism in Turkey.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52(3): 652–679.

Part III

Time, Place, Circulation

9

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery: Materialization as Metacultural Transformation∗ Nikolas Coupland and Helen Kelly-Holmes

Introduction We are concerned here with the place branding and marketing of material objects offered for sale, and with particular artifacts made and sold in bilingual Ireland and Wales. We consider two specific cases: the Melin Tregwynt woollen mill located on the St. Davids peninsula in southwest Wales (www .melintregwynt.co.uk), and the Louis Mulcahy pottery workshop based in Dingle in southwest Ireland (www.louismulcahy.com). The strategy of place branding is a familiar one, associating a product with a named or symbolically invoked national, regional, or local place that is assumed to give it a measure of distinctiveness and appeal (cf. Schroeder 2009; Schroeder and Salzer-Mörling 2006). But our two chosen cases give us access to sociolinguistic processes that are particular to “small and peripheral languages and nations” – a controversial phrase1 that we use for orientation purposes – and particular to the contemporary sociolinguistic and sociopolitical circumstances of Welsh and Irish as privileged (in terms of official status and language policy and planning interventions, which Irish and Welsh certainly are) and revitalizing small languages. Peripherality and smallness are, of course, relative concepts, but also flexible ones. Even more than identifying a language in terms of its distance ∗

This chapter emerges from our collaborative research with Sari Pietikäinen (as principal investigator) and Alexandra Jaffe on a project funded by the Finnish Academy; see www.peripheralmultilingualism.fi/. We are indebted to our two principal colleagues and to other members of the Peripheral Multilingualism project group for many formative discussions of the issues and data in this chapter, although all shortcomings are our own. Nik also gratefully acknowledges the support of University of Technology Sydney where he was employed for much of the life of the project. The project website and other online materials referenced in this chapter were last consulted on May 27, 2016. We are grateful to Eifion Griffiths, proprietor of Melin Tregwynt, for giving us permission to scrutinize and interpret the organization’s activities and for his generous agreement to give two substantial interviews about the mill, its history, and its marketing. Angharad Hodgson and Charlotte Selleck made important contributions to data gathering, cataloging, and the development of a critical perspective for this project.

165

166

Language and Materiality

from centers (of power, economic infrastructure, demographic concentrations) or in terms of numbers of speakers or another quantitative measure of vitality and power, we see peripherality and smallness as potentially productive and new ways of being for languages that have histories of minoritization.2 One of our ambitions for this chapter is to illustrate how this apparently paradoxical position has come about in relation to the marketing of nationally branded artifacts, (for an extensive discussion of this and related processes, see Pietikäinen, Jaffe, Kelly-Holmes, and Coupland 2016). We point to similarities in how Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy are able to imbue their enterprises of “making” – a term that has become conventional for artisanal, craft-based manufacturing – and their products with linguistic and cultural value. They do this not only by embedding fragments of Welsh and Irish and nationally salient visual themes and tropes in the material objects that they manufacture but also by narrating and interpreting national and cultural values more explicitly in their marketing discourses. These are the general devices of place branding, incorporating material dimensions of language and iconography into the materiality of culturally resonant “things.” But we are particularly interested in how these constructions map onto social and linguistic changes in Wales and Ireland. We argue that Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy’s making and marketing play a role in the reflexive reinterpretation of language and culture in rural Wales and Ireland. They show how it is possible to reconfigure what might be considered to be minority, peripheral, traditional, and artisanal national spaces into sites of elite and global production and consumption. We also hope to show that these processes are more complex, contingent, and multilayered than is usually implied in the idea of place branding. We use the concept of transformation to illustrate this point. We argue that the two commercial enterprises overlay their own transformative material actions on linguistic and cultural transformations that are underway in Wales and Ireland and that have in turn created the conditions for commercially motivated transformations to occur. To that extent we support a perspective on language materiality (or transformative discursive action and materialization) that does not treat “the linguistic” and “the material” as necessarily separate entities (cf. Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume). It is, of course, reasonable to call manufactured woollen goods and pottery artifacts “material objects” and to identify product labels and marketing texts as “linguistic objects.” But we argue instead for a view of materialization as a succession of reciprocal transformative movements between discourses and things, through which it becomes possible to see cultural attributes and conditions being reshaped in the material forms of (particular classes of) things, and those things as discursively “stabilized” metacultural objects. A view of language as commodity enables this kind of focus. Following Appadurai (1986), we can see small languages as enclaved objects,

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

167

which have been objectified and protected from market forces by language policy and planning. As a result of changes in the political economy of these languages, one current transformation is from enclaved status to elite commodity. The wider social transformations have to do with ideological inversions of older assumptions regarding authenticity, smallness, and peripherality in a context of increasing globalization and homogenization of markets (Duchêne and Heller 2012). The gains that have been achieved for small languages in terms of language rights, through language policy and planning initiatives, have created contexts where the shackles of minoritization can be set aside. In addition, economic and technological changes in market structures have made it possible for products from the periphery to have access to and compete on global markets (again, see Pietikäinen et al. 2016 for an extensive discussion of these issues). Therefore, transformations in the production of material artifacts that are the focus of this chapter sit within particular social transformations, and in fact we can consider them to be manifestations of those social changes as well as being facilitated by them. One set of social changes is general; another set is specific to small languages such as Irish and Welsh. The general changes can be summed up in the concepts of globalization, reflexive modernization, and mediatization (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994). We understand mediatization as “the proliferation of [technologically-based] media communication in all areas of social life and the central role of media in socio-cultural change” (Androutsopoulos 2014: 10). Virtually all cultures that are subject not only to accelerated flows of people and things but also to accelerated flows of mediated cultural forms, representations, and relativizations are increasingly unable to function nonreflexively. It becomes less possible to just “live out” inherited social formations, deterministically. Heightened reflexivity quite generally promotes commodifications of culture, including language, which are often reductive and stylized – perhaps inevitably stylized, because they need to be mediated into “small spaces.” The market conditions under which commodified objects are produced and consumed impose new demands on semiosis, particularly the need for visual and linguistic immediacy, starkness, brightness, and simplicity. Objects need to be styled on these principles. This gives us one way to understand cultural branding, place branding, and language branding as a highly contemporary metacultural activity (see also Shankar, Chapter 5, this volume). It is unsurprising that sociolinguists and anthropological linguists have been motivated to reconsider materiality and materialization under these general circumstances. But as discussed later, Wales, Ireland, and particular other small language cultures are caught up in more specific crosscurrents of social and sociolinguistic change. On the one hand, like most other communities, they have to navigate accelerated globalization, reflexive modernization, and

168

Language and Materiality

mediatization. On the other hand, they have to accommodate and respond to intensified aspirations to nationhood and linguistic revitalization that have appeared over recent decades. Our contribution to the volume and to understandings of the materiality of language falls within studies that approach linguistic practices and forms from a political-economic point of view. The language practices involved in the branding and marketing of the products that we consider are not detachable from the material conditions of their production and consumption: in particular, the physical environment in which these businesses are located (which in both cases involves iconic scenery in peripheral landscapes) and their sociolinguistic settings, which are complex bilingual zones of revitalization and language politics and policies, with quite similar economic conditions and challenges. Thus, we argue that linguistic smallness and geographic peripherality – both linked to the political economy of where and how these goods are produced and consumed – are part of the materiality of these products and their marketing. In the contexts of concern in our research, as we outline later, there is partial revitalization: people often enjoy a primarily symbolic relationship with the relevant small language, and language policy and planning focus on material dimensions of language as much as, if not more than, semantic/pragmatic dimensions of general language use. Thus, a research focus on small languages necessitates a view of language that is informed by a concern with the material (see, for example, Kelly-Holmes 2005, 2014, on linguistic fetish and visual multilingualism; Coupland, 2014a, on the boundedness of Welsh). In the next section we briefly summarize the sociolinguistic circumstances of the Irish and Welsh languages. We explain the ways in which their status as “small and peripheral national languages” has opened up the possibility (in fact, we think, the inevitability) of their being subject to objectification and commodification, in particular respects and from particular points of view. Indeed, these are particular sociolinguistic transformations on which commercial agents, including those highlighted in this case study, can overlay their own specific transformative actions and add value to their products as metacultural objects. In a following section we show how Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy successfully exploit this tendency and give examples of the linguistic and cultural values that they bring into play. While neither enterprise is in any simple sense “bilingual” (Welsh-English, Irish-English), each draws on a rich array of linguistic, historical, topographic, and semiotic repertoires. Each is able to establish a commercial niche by offering culturally authenticated products for global as well as local consumers. In a later section we build a theoretical overview of the layered transformational processes that we see functioning in both sites, through which “material stabilization,” the stabilization of a linguistic-material phenomenon as concept and practice, is achieved (Slater 2002).

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

169

Materialization and/of Small, Peripheral Languages: Welsh and Irish Welsh and Irish languages are primarily known to sociolinguistics as two endangered minority languages of the Celtic periphery, on the western fringe of Europe. Wales and Ireland have, each in their own way, long and complex histories of national engagement and antagonism with the English state. Bilingual ideologies and practices in each case have been organized around degrees and moments of Anglicization, minoritization, and attempted revitalization of an endangered national language. Today, however, each country has established a stable political relationship with England – Ireland through independent statehood and Wales through political devolution to Wales within the United Kingdom polity. Each nation is officially bilingual, with English being the dominant code, demographically speaking. In the most recent census data, gathered in 2011, 41 percent of the population of Ireland reported themselves as being able to speak Irish. However, a quarter of these reported that they never speak Irish, and only 1.8 percent of daily use of Irish is reported to be outside of the education system. In the Gaeltacht, the officially designated Irish-speaking areas, the figures for the ability to speak Irish are 68.5 percent, and 24 percent for daily usage ([Irish] Central Statistics Office 2012). Headline findings from the 2011 census in Wales show that some 19.0 percent of the overall population older than three years of age (562,016 individuals) reported themselves (or are reported by family members) to “speak Welsh,” which represents an unexpected fall from 20.5 percent in 2001. But as in the Irish case, densities of Welsh-speaking populations differ widely on a geographical basis. In both national contexts there are effectively no monolingual speakers of the small language, which foregrounds the use of Welsh or Irish as a matter of preference and sometimes as a matter of ethnosymbolic display (Eastman and Stein 1993; Coupland 2012; KellyHolmes 2005, 2014). The more institutionally consolidated Irish Gaeltacht is paralleled in Wales by the vaguer concept of a Welsh language “heartland.” Each of these zones is coastal and western. To that extent, not only are Wales and Ireland geographically peripheral in Europe but also each linguistically highlighted territory is geographically peripheral within its own country – notwithstanding that use of the small language is in each case urbanizing. Yet, the peripheral territories where the small languages have been most strongly embedded have come to act as centers (rather than peripheries) in some respects. For example, they provide a focus for political action and activism, as well as for language learning (although Welsh and Irish are required subjects in formal education across the whole of Wales and Ireland, respectively), and they tend to be spaces where

170

Language and Materiality

small and medium-sized businesses have found it possible to exploit cultural Welshness and Irishness. The Louis Mulcahy pottery workshop is based in Dingle, within the Irish Gaeltacht in the southwest of Ireland. The Melin Tregwynt woollen mill is situated close to the north coast of the southwest Wales peninsula, on a supposed isogloss (the Landsker line) that historically divided “more Welsh” from “more English” parts of the county of Pembrokeshire. Both sites also rely heavily on seasonal tourism, which makes them important centers of activity, given that rural economies in both Ireland and Wales are necessarily mixed and rely heavily on tourism. In fact we can say that the geographical peripherality of southwest Wales and southwest Ireland, along with their salience as bilingual zones, is a key factor that authenticates them for purposes of tourist consumption (Pietikäinen et al. 2016; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2013). Irish and Welsh are considered to be endangered languages, and they have been supported by strong and ambitious language planning and revitalization initiatives over several decades (for Wales, see papers in Coupland and Aldridge 2009; Williams 2001, 2008; for Ireland see ÓLaoire 2005; Mac Giolla Chríost 2005). We do not have space to review these initiatives here, but it is reasonable to say that, although activists’ demands are far from being fully met, many significant gains have been made in each national context. In particular, compulsory study of the small language in formal education has produced many cohorts of young people who have the potential to go on to function bilingually after leaving school, despite some evidence (as mentioned earlier) that relatively few do so.3 Legal frameworks are in place to protect and boost the status of both languages, and resources continue to flow in support of them. On these grounds we can say that Irish and Welsh are, relatively speaking, “privileged small languages,” although this is not to say that their speakers do not encounter repressive language-ideological forces and practical barriers; see, for example, the latest report of the An Coimisinéir Teanga – the Irish Language Commissioner – for an overview of issues (An Coimisinéir Teanga 2012). In relation to materiality and materialization, however, it is clear that planning and revitalization initiatives have played a significant role in commodifying the small languages that they target. They continue to do this, and it is in the nature of such regimes to do so. For example, the Welsh Assembly Government (through the former Welsh Language Board [Bwrdd Yr Iaith]) targeted a five percentage-point increase in the proportion of self-declaring speakers of Welsh at the 2011 census, and considerable public anxiety was voiced when it became clear in 2012 that this target had not been met. “The fate of the language” (which is a resonant phrase in the cultural history of Welsh) was once again called into question, after two decades of census data-based optimism in public commentary that the historic decline of Welsh had been halted.

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

171

The more general point here is that the enumeration of speakers, which has always been a basic point of reference for policy decisions and language planning targets, has fed into a conception of Welsh and Irish as consolidated, bounded, measurable cultural objects (cf. Heller 2003, 2007; Jaffe 2006; Makoni and Pennycook 2007; Moore, Pietikäinen, and Blommaert 2010; Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). In this familiar discourse, language objects are also commonly treated as being animate, possessing a specifiable degree of vitality (or “livingness”) and health: an anthropomorphic language ideology, casting languages as animate beings, is often taken for granted in revitalization discourses. Because small languages are already objectified and commodified through endangerment and revitalization discourses, and these processes are further enhanced in language policy and language planning, they are particularly suited for commercial application and exploitation. For example, An Teanga Beo, “The Living Language,” is a common trope of revitalization discourse in Ireland, just as Iaith Fyw: Iaith Byw, “A Living Language: A Language for Life,” is the title of the most recent language policy consultation document in Wales. These commodifications are supported in other ways, for example through the spatial delineation of speech communities (in concepts such as the Gaeltacht and the Welsh “heartland”). We also see an embedded pattern of public reference to Welsh and Irish, for example, as “our own language,” “our native tongue,” “the language of Wales/Ireland,” or (as we noted earlier) simply “the language.” Overt commitments to linguistic standardization – to stabilizing grammars and lexicons and usage in other regards – again consolidate the idea that the linguistic object is coherent, knowable, and independent (Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014). Furthermore, there is often an emphasis on the material properties of the language and/or the texts (see Murphy, Chapter 4, and Dickinson, this volume) produced through such policy and planning initiatives; for example, in language signage legislation, where the focus is on font, order, hierarchy, and so on (Coupland 2012). There is a self-perpetuating cyclical relationship between revitalization initiatives and the ideology of linguistic commodification. Language policy and planning institutions ideologize small languages as commodities in order to make them controllable and then to bring them under the control of institutional planning agencies. Commodification makes it natural and necessary to improve the “size” and the “quality” of the commodity, not only through codification (corpus planning), “delineation of higher status forms as standards” (status planning) and increased “circulation of standard-language-as-thing” but also by investing in more language education (acquisition planning) (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). Outcomes from such processes then need to be measurable within the same language-ideological framework, notably in demographic trend data (“how many [new] speakers have been generated,” and so on).

172

Language and Materiality

Other outcomes also consolidate the small language as a commodity. One of these is a general pattern of linguistic/semiotic landscaping (e.g., Jaworski and Thurlow 2010; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael, and Barni 2010) or displayed public bilingualism (Coupland 2012) as a device of status planning and linguistic normalization and a means of increasing perceived ethnolinguistic vitality. Language policy and legislation in both Ireland and Wales (e.g. the Official Languages Act in Ireland [2002] and the influential planning document Iaith Pawb in Wales, dating from 2002) have explicitly targeted the outcome of the small language having increased visibility of a literal sort, by erecting more bilingual road signs, place names, and so on – thereby increasing, it is assumed, the salience of bilingualism in the public consciousness. This concern with visibility prioritizes linguistic form over communicative function and, in Shankar and Cavanaugh’s terms, “objectifies these linguistic forms in ways that iconize or rhematize them and allow them to gather value” (2012: 361; see also KellyHolmes 2005). We have emphasized the objectification and commodification of Welsh and Irish within revitalization regimes because we believe that this broad ideological realignment has applications well beyond language policy and planning. That is, now that it has become commonplace to orient to Irish and Welsh as cultural commodities (in ways that are simply inapplicable to English or other languages or to more local ways of speaking that are in circulation), people are “primed” and have precedent to construct and to exploit these linguistic commodities in other social, political, and economic domains. Duchêne and Heller’s (2012) “pride/profit” duality explains how a small national language that has been ideologized as a touchstone for national identitification and authenticity (“pride”) can be recoded and commodified for its commercial value (“profit”) under changing market conditions. This is a key insight for our own analysis. But we argue that Irish and Welsh were already deeply commodified within the nationalist ideological architecture of “pride,” which was in fact not insulated from commercial or “profit” values (given that revitalization initiatives have included moves to create employment opportunities for Welsh and Irish speakers). What we now see is therefore a widening of the spectrum in which commodified Welsh and Irish, under quite specific framing constraints, can add value to specific types of commercial activity. As we explain in the next section, Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy are craft enterprises involved in making – the artisanal manufacturing of material artifacts. Taken literally, making is a mode of materialization, and to the extent that linguistic and iconographic resources are materially structured into the resultant artifacts (see the later discussion), we can say that materialization of this sort expands the potential for the commodification of small languages. In the first instance, we can again rely on a literal reading of commodification, in that linguistic/semiotic resources add commercial value to the products

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

173

concerned. Even so, there is a more abstract sense in which Welsh and Irish are thereby imbued with commodity value and confirmed to be associated with “profit” through the recontextualization of nationalistic “pride.” In fact we also find it helpful to theorize materialization (the process of becoming material or making material) in ways that go beyond the merely physical. Materialization can be understood as a process of attempted “stabilization” (Slater 2002), and a family of processes including objectification and commodification, as well as materialization, can be viewed as a series of moves to stabilize a phenomenon “as a conceptual and practical strategy” (ibid.: 100). Slater argues that the marketing of goods can be understood as a process of “blackboxing” that involves treating “social objects as finalized entities with fixed boundaries that cut them off cleanly from other objects and social processes on their outside and that endow them with a taken-for-granted “inside” that is assumed to account for their shape and stability” (ibid.: 100). We argue that endangerment and revitalization discourses in Wales and Ireland triggered this blackboxing process, sensitizing people to the commodity values – cultural and commercial – of Welsh and Irish as “languages made material” and inviting new ways of exploiting these values in specific frameworks. As Slater argues, attempts at stabilization and materialization are “always provisional and contestable; their durability resides in a broad range of social conditions and balances of social powers” (ibid.: 98). This implies that materialization is an ongoing, agentive process where the stability and value of material incarnations need to be asserted and defended. This is what we see in Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy’s manufacturing and marketing processes, which we model (in a later section) as an interlinked set of transformations designed to fix, stabilize, or blackbox linguistic and semiotic resources with reference to particular cultural configurations of space and time. Marketing activities have a particular interest in achieving stability and consolidation of this sort, as a way of transforming objects and preparing them and their associated cultural referents for mobility (see Shankar, Chapter 5, this volume). Before exploring these ideas in more detail, we give some textual and contextual details of our two case studies. Products and Marketing of Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy Commercial initiatives are sometimes able to find added value (Jaffe 2006) not only in small languages and their social and cultural profiles but also in very specific contexts of (often highly selective) representation and use. They can invoke the semiotics of tradition and of localism, but they need to rework these values to meet contemporary priorities in particular markets (see Cavanaugh, Chapter 6, this volume). This is what we see in both the Melin Tregwynt woollen mill (literally translated as “the mill of the windy village”) and the

174

Language and Materiality

Louis Mulcahy pottery factory. While the artifacts that they produce and market are strongly themed in national and local terms, their very successful marketing and sales efforts quickly transcend local- and national-level structures and networks. Both enterprises invoke local linguistic, semiotic, and cultural resources in their product designs and marketing discourses, but project them out into both national and international markets (cf. Kelly-Holmes 2013). Both are family-owned companies making significant contributions to local rural economies. Both companies produce high-end, design-led products – pottery tableware, lighting, vases, and so on, and woollen blankets, cushions, clothing, etc. – and are well-known brands. Melin Tregwynt uses the headline slogan “woven in Wales” and, more recently, “woven in Wales for 100 years.” But its self-representational discourse clearly points forward as much as backward: Melin Tregwynt heralds a new spirit in Welsh design with exclusive wool blankets, throws and cushions, furniture, accessories and clothing that combine authentic Welsh tradition with innovative and modern design. Our collection is constantly evolving – so keep visiting – or subscribe to our RSS feed to be kept updated on any changes to this website.

Its marketing is almost entirely in English, although cultural embedding in Wales is a repeated theme, not least in the direct claim that the company makes to being committed to preserving an “authentic Welsh tradition.” Louis Mulcahy Pottery’s homepage also explicitly makes a product-placelanguage link and expresses commitment to the locality and tradition with its headline, “One of the last workshops making every piece by hand at their base in Dingle,” and the simultaneous use of the Irish language in its slogan, potadóireacht na caolóige (the sparrow pottery), written in the old Irish alphabet. As with Melin Tregwynt, the cultural embedding of the products in Ireland, and more specifically in the peripheral site of the Dingle peninsula/ Corca Dhuibhne, is prominent throughout Louis Mulcahy’s marketing. Customers are told about the pottery’s “support of the local culture including the endangered Irish language” and that “the family took the time and effort to learn the local language and speak it in their home and business” (www.louismulcahy .com). The website offers an Irish-language (Gaeilge) version; however, it has been under construction and unavailable for some time, and the message to that effect is given in Irish also. Furthermore, the Facebook name for the company includes the Irish slogan and so creates a bilingual name, Louis Mulcahy Pottery Potadóireacht na Caolóige, and Facebook status updates are posted in both Irish and English. Fragments of Welsh are dotted through Melin Tregwynt catalogs and product names. An April 2014 website promotion in connection with Mother’s Day shows a pottery heart inscribed with Mam, the Welsh (but transferable) form of

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

175

reference and address for “Mum” or “Mom.” The company has sold china mugs and other crockery carrying Welsh words such as coffi, te, cawl (broth), siwgr (sugar), llaeth (milk), and cariad (darling), as well as woolen slippers with the bilingual inscription cerdd’n esmwyth (walk softly). One of its established woollen fabric designs is called Carew, which references a nearby west Wales village whose name is heard to be more Welsh than English. Another is called Carthen, which, as a nonproper noun, is the Welsh name for a traditional Welsh woven blanket. But Welsh is most obviously displayed through repeated uses of the company name Melin Tregwynt itself, on labels discreetly attached to products as well as more insistently present in catalogs and web pages. Irish tokens are also used by Louis Mulcahy Pottery in a variety of ways. The collection offers products in a range of colors, two of which are Irish words: dearg (red) and smoilín (little/young thrush). The other colors are navy, russet, and tenmoku; the last word comes from Japanese pottery terminology, but has become part of the global lexicon of this marketing domain. Irish is also used for housekeeping purposes on the company’s website, with the address and contact details being given in Irish only. A particularly striking aspect of both companies’ marketing strategies is that the use of the respective small language appears in many cases primarily driven by a concern with visual characteristics and creating a visual rather than linguistic-semantic effect. For example, the old Irish alphabet used for the slogan of the Louis Mulcahy site and the name of the pottery itself are, for nonIrish speakers and even for those with school Irish, challenging, both to pronounce and to understand. Likewise, the “un-English” orthographic sequences in some of the Melin Tregwynt marketing items cited earlier – , , word-initial – create a visual distinctiveness for the products. A major theme of “traditional Welshness” in Melin Tregwynt’s marketing is mention of and commentary on the history of sheep rearing, wool spinning, and cloth weaving in rural southwest Wales. The website has specific pages devoted to the mill (looms were originally powered by a water wheel), history, and old pictures, for example (see Image 9.1). People coming to browse and buy items at the mill shop are able to enter the main weaving loom shed to watch cloth being made from yarn, and this allows Melin Tregwynt to function also as a small-scale heritage tourism facility (cf. Coupland and Coupland 2014). Marketing texts and displays dwell on the theme of Welsh sheep. Another web page is titled Weird and Woolly, assembling interesting and strange facts and anecdotes about sheep. The mill shop also sells a range of sheep as soft toys. The mill did indeed once have close associations with local sheep farming, although local wool is no longer used to make Melin Tregwynt fabrics because it is of an inferior grade and is too coarse. Explicit metacultural accounts – direct explanations of the cultural connections and value of products – also feature in Louis Mulcahy’s marketing texts.

176

Language and Materiality

Image 9.1 Melin Tregwynt’s weaving loom shed

Visitors to the website can take a virtual tour of the workshop where they can see the process of manufacture by hand. For instance, under the heading Pugging (working clay into a soft condition), visitors can see a photo of a local worker carrying out this activity, and by clicking on the heading, they have access to detailed information about the production process, such as the following: We take delivery of 22 tonnes 5 times annually blended to our own recipes. We use two types of clay: 1 Fine clay: this is a smooth clay for our tableware. 2 Grog clay: which is a more coarse clay giving it a more “stand up” quality for our larger and more intricate pots. The clay is packed in 12.5 and 25 kilo bags. We adjust the moisture content according to the needs of individual throwers and the pots they are making. (www.louismulcahy.com)

Local themes are implicated throughout Melin Tregwynt’s marketing, for example in the fabric design called St. David’s Cross (visible in Image 9.1), which has multiple referents: it refers to St. David or Dewi Sant, the patron saint of Wales; to the small coastal town of St. Davids (Tyddewi) a few miles from the mill, named after the saint; and to the “Saint David’s cross,” which is the emblem of the patron saint’s flag, a yellow cross on a black background.

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

177

Another fabric design is called Knot Garden, this time referring to “Celtic knot” design patterns. Yet the company’s marketing also articulates global connectedness and modernity. Other fabric designs, for example, are called Mondo, Madison, and Lunar. The website gives regular updates on Melin Tregwynt’s participation in international design shows and exposure in international elite networks, such as a prominent display of the mill’s products at the Maison&Objet Paris design fair or a feature about the company in Australian Vogue. This global-local interface is also evident in the color range for Louis Mulcahy (mentioned earlier), whereby Irish terms (dearg, smoilín) sit alongside the lexicon of international design (russet, tenmoku). Materialization through Discursive and Metacultural Transformations We suggested earlier that materiality and the process of “becoming material” need not refer only to having and obtaining physical form. Along with other theoretical perspectives, heritage theory (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995, 2004) and marketing theory (Slater 2002), which are our focus here, have already pointed to the rather unproductive distinction between material and immaterial culture, and it is clear that physical artifacts only find their cultural value and authenticity in and through discursive processes of claiming, evaluation, and accreditation. Even so, as we noted earlier, Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy are evidently enterprises that do produce material artifacts, in the most conservative sense of that expression. This gives us a starting point in the interpretation of their activities as chains of transformative action, which build on and take for granted the transformative work already done in discursive processes around revitalization, language policy and planning, and commodification, as discussed earlier. Making, in relation to craft enterprises, most immediately involves the transformation of elemental materials (mainly clay and wool in the cases we are considering) into physical objects of higher value, in one sense or another. Pots and blankets clearly have potentially practical value, but the process of making usually creates aesthetic value too. Even the most utilitarian of made objects are liable to have aesthetic value. An even pattern of weaving or a regular alternation of thread colors may be visually appealing, so that making will often be aesthetically transformative, and indeed a mode of aestheticization and resemioticization (Iedema 2003). The concept of artisanal making, in particular, implies a skilled, individuated, and vernacular mode of craft production that is understood to be reflected in the aesthetic and material qualities of artifacts. The thematizing and prominent position of the production processes in the marketing of both Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy, as outlined earlier, reflects this conceptualization. In any event, it is clear that making entails far more than

178

Language and Materiality

shape shifting or the manipulation of one material condition into another. Aesthetic judgement is culturally embedded, inevitably viewed through a cultural lens that valorizes specific forms as being attractive, falling within a cultural tradition, and so on, and, therefore, are processes of making. A material object authenticated on the basis of its practical value in a premodern culture becomes an object to be seen or handled in new ways; the making practices and indeed the culture in which it originally functioned themselves become heritageized as objects of respect or even reverence. In the cases we are considering, potentially practical functions of the artifacts in question have been superseded by other considerations – people do not buy Melin Tregwynt blankets to keep warm or Louis Mulcahy urns to carry water. Not only are these objects of aesthetic appeal but they are also objects of gaze, and icons of taste.4 They are objects constituted not only as artifacts but also as objets d’art. They have attained stable and material status in new contexts. This is in part a socioeconomic transformation, a qualitative upgrading of potentially useful objects into elite objects of distinction. A page on the Louis Mulcahy website recycles a quotation from The Irish Times, stating that “there is a big-headedness, a breath of imaginative design and decoration, and always immaculate craftsmanship [in Louis Mulcahy’s work].” This sort of transformation opens paths for the products to “travel” (more or less literally) into elite taste networks and into more rarified realms of aesthetics. But how does this come about? What other transformations allow it to work? As we have already noted, transformation implies movement from an earlier state of being (physical, cultural, ideological) into a later state of being. But a key factor in the transformations we see here is the ability to bring states of being, earlier and later, into perceptible and reflexive relation with each other and to stabilize these relations, if only temporarily. The fact that Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy products have their origins in (arguably) peripheral bilingual spaces and in traditional practices of making that were represented there establishes one side of a relational structure. The other side is represented by modernity and globalized structures of taste and value. We have already noted the admixture of traditional and modern, local and global themes in the two companies’ marketing discourse, and we can now say that this duality of perspective represents a cultural transformation made visible. It constructs a stable materiality for processes of making and for made objects that is based in both continuity and change, in both traditional culture and creativity and innovation. As we saw earlier, “tradition” is constructed as an array of different values that are themselves interconnected: place values (Welsh and Irish linguistic elements, tropes of Welshness and Irishness, rurality, peripherality, localness); people values (the family ownership of both business, in the case of Melin Tregwynt over many decades); and practice values (skills, ways of working,

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

179

continuous use of specific weaving designs and materials, and the thematizing and documenting of these in the marketing of the products). But in contemporary markets, these values can only “pay off” when they have been reflexively transformed – refashioned into “unique” and “exclusive” commodities that are “constantly evolving” (as the marketing discourses themselves claim). Authenticity and authentication are in play here (cf. Cavanaugh and Shankar 2014; Coupland 2003, 2014b; Jaffe 2011). What we have been calling “traditional” may in fact be better described as a constellation of vernacular authenticities. Authenticity is premised on positively valued historical continuity, cultural coherence, and consensus, and these attributes are conventionally assigned to nonreflexive, intergenerationally transmitted, rural artisanship. But authenticity of this sort is not sufficient for the enterprises we are studying here. There needs to be flexibility in how authenticity is invoked, and space needs to be created for late-modern authenticities of consumption under circumstances of mobility. What we see in the marketing discourses of these products is an attempt at stabilization – a fixing of language, place, and product, albeit temporary, as mentioned earlier – as a way of making highly local and culturally authenticated language-place-product constellations mobile and transportable to customers all over the world. In Bauman and Briggs’s (1990) terms, then, this transformation is about maximizing the “prepared-for detachability of texts,” maximizing the ease with which such texts can be recontextualized. Significantly, this material transformation is only possible by tying language, place, and cultural practice together and explicitly thematizing, even hyperbolizing, this fixedness and materiality. Before they can become mobile – successfully marketable – beyond their immediate locality and beyond their instrumental uses, these products must first be anchored (Bauman and Briggs 1990) in that local culture. That anchoring involves actively (re)embedding the respective small language into its cultural context (because this link cannot be assumed to be known by consumers) and then actively embedding the language/culture complex into the material form of particular made objects. This is what we mean by saying that products need to be transformed not only into cultural objects but also into metacultural objects (Urban 2001); they exist in their cultures, but they also project specific accounts and interpretations of those cultures. In Heller’s (2008) terms, there need to be a “reinscription and reentextualization (Silverstein and Urban 1996) of old discourses of language, community and identity . . . realigned in order to circulate differently and for different purposes” (Heller 2008: 516). It is important to stress that these transformations are fundamentally discursive processes, even though they actively coalesce in and around the material forms of made objects. The transformations are achievements of discourse in the sense that the made products have to both “speak” (or express) their cultural values and have their cultural values “spoken about” (be metaculturally

180

Language and Materiality

narrated). They speak by virtue of their material forms, designs, and other visual and linguistic characteristics, including the fragments of Welsh and Irish that we have pointed to. They are narrated in marketing texts and in the selfaccounting web pages that we have also mentioned.5 “Speaking” and “being spoken about” come together in labels on products (see Pietikainen and KellyHolmes 2011 for a discussion of tourist souvenir labels), where the brand names Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy and the design category of an object (St David’s Cross or Carew fabrics or the pottery color names smoilin or dearg) are parts of the material constitution of the products. Discussion: Materialization as Metacultural Transformation The Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy cases are highly specific ones; however, they do show how small languages are particularly suited to be the objects of discursively realized metacultural transformation. The objectification and commodification that small languages necessarily go through as a result of endangerment and revitalization discourses enable their further commodification as part of marketing discourses. In our understanding of materialization as a process of attempting temporary stabilization, we can see the revitalization and commodification work that goes on around small languages (for example, language policy and language planning) also as attempts at stabilization. Marketers, such as those at Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy, are then able to build on these discursive and metacultural processes, adapting salient aspects of Welsh and Irish cultural histories to suit contemporary market opportunities. We have argued that the main discursive and metacultural transformation involves an anchoring of language and product to place. This anchoring, ironically, can be seen as a discursive transformation and preparation for mobility: it is a process of entextualization that deliberately aims at future and nonspecific recontextualization. As we mentioned earlier, Heller explains how, in her conception, linguistic and cultural authenticity attaching to particular minority languages and their meanings as national symbols is liable to be commodified, to do work in neoliberal market conditions of the new economy. But the present data show that globalized, late-modern markets can still find value in traditional and vernacular authenticities, provided that they are reconstituted into more dialogic frames of value, where tradition connects with (as opposed to conflicting with) creativity and evolution. Furthermore, we can see how the late-modern market, with its technological affordances, allows for a bypassing of national channels for small languages. The marketing discourses of Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy show these (supposedly) peripherally located enterprises addressing and dialoguing with global audiences, rather than needing to be channeled by national media and value scales. We can see here how something approaching

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

181

“Celtic cool” can be commercially targeted. Although the two cases we consider in the chapter are small-scale initiatives, they show how globalization, mediatization, and commodification are not always-and-only threats to small languages, whatever their undesirable consequences might be in other ways. As Park and Wee (2012) argue, linguistic commodification can be a liberating process, providing an alternative to and a means of escaping from overbearing discourses of national, regional, or ethnic identity. Quite probably, no single coherent national model can dominate under reflexive modernization, and we should expect to see further cultural fragmentation and local, opportunistic appeals to national culture and identity. Finally, such transformations may also alter the prevailing political economy, albeit only in local respects. The peripheral sites where the Louis Mulcahy pottery and Melin Tregwent are located can become “central” to tourist routes, thus potentially transforming economic power relations – the historically negative values of smallness and peripherality are transformed into positive commercial opportunities in niche markets. Likewise, they offer new ways of interacting with these small languages – for speakers and nonspeakers alike – and as such can contribute to “remaking the everyday encounter” (Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume) with these languages, particularly in situations of complex and shifting bilingualism. N OT E S 1 Smallness and peripherality are both conventionally associated with so-called minority languages, in a complex of negatively valenced understandings of these terms. Our ambition here is to challenge this conventional orientation. 2 The usual issue arises of whether sociolinguistic circumstances on the ground are actually new circumstances or new lines of interpretation, as opposed to unchanging circumstances being newly interpreted by academic commentators. To be clear, we are arguing that there is significant change in both circumstances and interpretations. 3 For example, 64% of Irish seventeen- to eighteen-year-olds were reported to be able to speak Irish in 2011 ([Irish] Central Statistics Office 2012). Data for Wales are coded into slightly different categories, with the reported percentage of young people aged fifteen to twenty-two able to speak Welsh being 23.3% (Office of the Welsh Language Commissioner, see www.comisiynyddygymraeg.org). 4 Through a lack of direct evidence, in this discussion we are necessarily simplifying the account of how particular objects appeal to particular constituencies of consumers and on what particular bases. Melin Tregwynt and Louis Mulcahy products certainly appeal to relatively affluent people, tourists and nontourists, who are likely to value these products as elite and perhaps collectible items. 5 The Melin Tregwynt mill site uses rather elaborate tableaux/ poster displays, showing how earlier family members did the same jobs as today, under near-identical physical circumstances. Visitors are implicitly invited to compare the posters’ visualizations of traditional weaving practices at the site with the human and mechanical activities they can witness in the weaving shed – and they find little difference.

182

Language and Materiality

REFERENCES An Coimisinéir Teanga. 2012. Tuarascáil Bhliantúil / Annual Report 2012. Available at http://coimisineir.ie/downloads/Annual_Report_2012.pdf Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2014. “Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change: Key Concepts, Research Traditions, Open Issues.” In Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change, edited by Jannis Androutsopoulos, 3–48. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59– 88. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash eds. 1994. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Oxford: Polity Press. Cavanaugh, Jillian and Shalini Shankar. 2014. “Producing Authenticity in Global Capitalism: Language, Materiality and Value.” American Anthropologist 116(1):1–14. Central Statistics Office. 2012. This Is Ireland: Highlights from Census 2011, Part 1. Dublin: Stationery Office. Coupland, Bethan and Nikolas Coupland. 2014. “The Authenticating Discourses of Mining Heritage Tourism in Cornwall and Wales.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(4): 495–517. Coupland, Nikolas. 2003. “Sociolinguistic Authenticities.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7, 3: 417–431. 2012. “Bilingualism on Display: The Framing of Welsh and English in Welsh Public Spaces.” Language in Society 41: 1–27. 2013. “Welsh Tea: The Centring and Decentring of Wales and the Welsh language.” In Multilingualism and the Periphery, edited by Sari Pietikäinen and Helen KellyHolmes, 133–153. New York: Oxford University Press. 2014a. “Wales and Welsh: Boundedness and peripherality.” In Language and Borders, edited by D. Watt and C. Llamas, 137–153. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2014b. “Language, Society and Authenticity: Themes and Perspectives.” In Indexing Authenticity: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, edited by Véronique Lacoste, Jakob Leimgruber, and Thiemo Breyer, 14–39. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Coupland, Nikolas and Michelle Aldridge eds. 2009. “Sociolinguistic and Subjective Aspects of Welsh in Wales and Its Diaspora.” Special issue, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 195: 1–235. Duchêne, Alexandre and Monica Heller. 2012. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit. London: Routledge. Eastman, Carol and Roberta Stein. 1993. “Language Display: Authenticating Claims to Social Identity.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 14(3):187–202. Heller, Monica. 2003. “Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 473–92. 2007. Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography. London: Continuum. 2008. “Language and the Nation-State: Challenges to Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 504–524.

Making and Marketing in the Bilingual Periphery

183

Iedema, Rick. 2003. “Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as Multisemiotic Practice.” Visual Communication 2: 29–57. Jaffe, Alexandra. 2006. “Minority Language Movements.” In Bilingualism: A Social Approach, edited by Monica Heller, 50–70. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. 2011. “Sociolinguistic Diversity in Mainstream Media: Authenticity, Authority and Processes of Mediation and Mediatisation.” Journal of Language and Politics 10(4): 562–586. Jaworski, Adam and Crispin Thurlow, eds. 2010. Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum. Kelly-Holmes, Helen. 2005. Advertising as Multilingual Communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan. 2013. “Translation in Progress”: Centralizing and Peripheralizing Tensions in the Practices of Commercial Actors in Minority Language Sites.” In Multilingualism and the Periphery, edited by Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes, 118–132. New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. “Linguistic Fetish: The Sociolinguistics of Visual Multilingualism.” In Visual Communication, edited by David Machin, 135–151. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1995. “Theorizing Heritage.” Ethnomusicology 39(3): 367–380. 2004. “Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production.” Museum International 56:52–65. Mac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait. 2005. The Irish Language in Ireland: From Goídel to Globalisation. London: Routledge. Makoni, Sinfee and Alastair Pennycook, eds. 2007. Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Moore, Robert E., Sari Pietikäinen, and Jan Blommaert. 2010. “Counting the Losses: Numbers as the Language of Language Endangerment.” Sociolinguistic Studies 4, 1: 1–26. ÓLaoire, Muiris. 2005. “The Language Planning Situation in Ireland.” Current Issues in Language Planning 6:3: 251–314. Park, Joseph Sung-Yul and Lionel Wee. 2012. Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World. London: Routledge. Pietikäinen, Sari, Alexandra Jaffe, Helen Kelly-Holmes, and Nikolas Coupland. 2016. Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pietikäinen, Sari and Kelly-Holmes, Helen. 2011. “The Local Political Economy of Languages in a Sámi Tourism Destination: Authenticity and Mobility in the Labelling of Souvenirs.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(3): 323–346. eds. 2013. Multilingualism and the Periphery. New York: Oxford University Press. Schroeder, Jonathan E. 2002. Visual Consumption. London: Routledge. 2009. “The Cultural Codes of Branding.” Marketing Theory 9, 1: 123–126. Schroeder, Jonathan E. and Salzer-Mörling, M., eds. 2006. Brand Culture. London: Routledge. Shankar, Shalini and Cavanaugh, Jillian. 2012. “Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 355–369. Shohamy, Elana, Elizier Ben-Rafael, and Monica Barni, eds. 2010. Linguistic Landscape in the City. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

184

Language and Materiality

Silverstein, M. and G. Urban. 1996. “The Natural History of Discourse.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by M. Silverstein and G. Urban, 1–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slater, Don. 2002. “Markets, Materiality and the “New Economy.” ” In Market Relations and the Competitive Process, edited by Stan Metcalfe and Alan Warde, 95–113. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Urban, Greg. 2001. Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Colin H. 2001. Language Revitalization: Policy and Planning in Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2008. Linguistic Minorities in Democratic Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

10

Word-things and Thing-words: The Transmodal Production of Privilege and Status Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski

Introduction: Upward Mobility and Trickle-Down Luxury In the years that we have been researching and writing about super-elite travel and luxury tourism, we have always known that what really interested us was our complicit and often quite explicit role in it all. We have, for example, often tried to make sense of the way we allowed various airlines to entrance us with their elitist frequent-flyer games and to be seduced into thinking of ourselves as “elite.” How, we have wondered, were we to make sense of our constant awareness that it was all smoke and mirrors at one level – a manipulative and costly illusion – and yet all so pleasurable, comfortable, and tangible at another? Mostly, we have wanted to come to grips with our own bourgeois anxiety about always wanting “in” but always feeling “out” – that quintessentially bourgeois state of being Bourdieu (1984: 311) calls “relaxation in tension,” knowing always that there are knowing eyes who can spot the upstart, the climber, the parvenu. And that it is us. We are, of course, not alone with these moral and material (and materialistic) dilemmas. We are all of us everywhere being increasingly drawn into and positioned by elitist discourses and the rhetorics of luxury. Indeed, what we have quickly come to see from our own research is that the spaces of elite and superelite mobility are invariably populated not so much by the super-rich as they are by the people who have been referred to in recent political debates in Britain as “the squeezed middle class,” pursuing privilege as a hard-earned treat in what some describe as the “trip-of-a-lifetime” (e.g., Thurlow and Jaworski 2012).1 The putative “high net worth individuals” or so-called “1%-ers” have already moved on and are sequestered in tightly managed and rigorously policed locations – or airplanes – beyond our reach. Most of us can, at best, only experience this kind of exclusivity and privilege vicariously and, in Featherstone’s (2014: 106) terms, sampling “scaled-down versions” of the real thing. Indeed, the reality for us, as scholars, has always been that, in studying up, there was only ever so high we could go. Or could afford to go. Herein, however, lies the symbolic power of super-elite mobility and luxury travel: they not only sell visions of privilege and status but are constantly 185

186

Language and Materiality

(re)envisioning markers of privilege and status that “trickle down” into other modes of travel and that bleed into other domains of life (Thurlow 2016; Thurlow and Jaworski 2017a). These are some of the loci where the “indexicals” of travel are furnished with instructions (semiotic ideologies, see the later discussion) of what and how to desire, consume, and perform to attain a privileged status or elite persona. To be clear, our position is essentially the one at the heart of Veblen’s (1994 [1899]: 52) famous treatise: “the norm of reputability imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence . . . down through the social structure.” Just as the tidy rhetoric of 1 percent mystifies its nature and reach, however, the vast inequalities within its concomitant 99 percent are far too easily obscured (Thurlow and Jaworski 2017). While the imaginaries of privilege circulate widely, access and attainment are clearly impossible and likely unimaginable for many. Against this cultural-political backdrop, we want to hone in on the materiality of language and the language of materiality as they occur in the context of super-elite mobility and in our own experience as so-called premium travelers. Tourism and travel are, of course, a quintessential manifestation and engine of the global culture industry, which makes it an ideal site for examining materiality in both practical and theoretical ways: The global culture industry . . . is less a matter of the base determining the superstructure than the cultural superstructure collapsing, as it were, into the material base. . . . Images and other cultural forms from the superstructure collapse into the materiality of the infrastructure. The image, previously separated in the superstructure, is thingified, it becomes matter-image. (Lash and Lury 2007: 7; emphasis added.)

It is in this way that we see our chapter engaging materiality as a microlevel communicative practice and as a macrolevel cultural-theoretical phenomenon. As Lash and Lury (2007: 15) conclude, “The Weltanschauung . . . is no longer that of dialectical but of metaphysical materialism.” Put more simply, the relation between material conditions and cultural-cum-communicative formations is nowadays fully blurred. And this is the context in which we consider how the effectiveness of airline marketing hinges on the ability to switch back and forth (or toggle) constantly between linguistic, visual, and material modalities and between their different symbolic or iconic resonances. In other words, and still following Lash and Lury, it is through the “thingification of words” and the “wordification of things” that the illusion of status – and of its (easy) attainment – is managed and promoted. Before we turn to our data, however, we want to clarify our methodological framework. We do this partly with a view to reflecting later on the links between our work and that of the linguistic anthropologists who are the majority voice in this volume.

Word-things and Thing-words

187

Framework: Social Semiotics, Mediation, and Transmodalization All human actions are carried out through . . . mediational means. . . . [and] all mediational means, whether technological or psychological, are essentially material. . . . Just as psychological tools are made material through texts, utterances, practices and identities, material tools are integrated into psychological representations of social practices in the user’s habitus. In fact, it is only through being appropriated into the habitus as parts of social practices that objects become mediational means, as they arise as codification or materialization of social practices. (Jones and Norris 2005: 49–50)

In our work on elite discourse and luxury travel, we have tended to take a broadly multimodal, social-semiotic approach (see Thurlow 2015 for an overview), combined also with critical discourse analysis. Mindful of the fact that neither features explicitly or prominently in this volume, we therefore envisage our chapter as an interdisciplinary offering. In recent decades, social semiotics has established itself as an approach that takes as a starting point the materiality and constitutive power of communication (e.g., Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; van Leeuwen 2005; also Jones and Norris 2005: 49–50). Where critical discourse analysis typically attends to the political economies of language (e.g., Fairclough 2003), social semiotics adopts a more multimodal approach focusing on the interplay between, and the ideological workings of, different mediational means or semiotic resources. Key to this approach is the understanding that these means and resources are structured by their particular affordances and meaning potentials. The term “affordances” is borrowed from Gibson (1986), who argued that media, substances, surfaces, objects, bodies and their actions offer, provide, or furnish their observers with opportunities and limitations to undertake or perform certain actions. For example, if a flat surface with suitable support is knee-high, it can be sat on. But what is knee-high for an adult may be not so for a toddler. Therefore, an affordance is both environmental and perceptual, pointing both toward physical setting and to the observer. Affordances provide both opportunities and limitations to actions. For instance, a flat, extended, rigid surface, like the ground, can be used for walking, whereas a vertical, rigid structure, such as a wall, forms an obstacle to movement, but it can offer protection or shelter. Social semiotician van Leeuwen relates affordances to the Hallidayan notion of meaning potential in relation to all semiotic resources, which he defines as the actions, materials and artefacts we use for communicative purposes, whether produced physiologically – for example, with our vocal apparatus, the muscles we use to make facial expressions and gestures – or technologically – for example, with pen and ink, or computer hardware and software – together with the ways in which these

188

Language and Materiality

resources can be organized. Semiotic resources have a meaning potential, based on their past uses, and a set of affordances based on their possible uses, and these will be actualized in concrete social contexts where their use is subject to some form of semiotic regime. (van Leeuwen 2005: 285)

The emphasis here is clearly on the combination of the materiality of semiotic resources (or modes) and their cultural forms of signification, such as speech, which are “material and experiential as well as semiotic and social” (van Leeuwen 2014: 77). This sentiment is echoed in Kress’s assertion that “modes are the product jointly of the potentials inherent in the material and of culture’s selection from the bundle of aspects of these potentials and the shaping over time by (members of) a society of the features selected” (Kress 2010: 80– 81). Thus, potential uses and limitations of the material and formal properties of texts, objects, and events allow us to perform specific actions, invoke particular representations, take preferred subject positions, or express and share indexical meaning (see also Kockelman 2006). This, in turn, is what Rodney Jones (2009) refers to as the technologies of entextualization and recontextualization – the mediational means appropriated for the production and transportation of texts – for example, typewriters, computers, video cameras, oil paints, marble, metal, onstage performance, and so on – that create different spatial and temporal “relationships of possibility” (van Lier 2004: 105) in moments of social participation. Social semioticians’ interest in the affordances of speech and writing (rather than the abstract idea of “language”) alongside visual, nonverbal, and other sensory resources, views all semiosis as social action embedded in larger economic and cultural practices (see Kress 2010). Social semiotics therefore looks not only to relate texts to contexts, but also to speculate on related social tendencies and their political implications, recognizing that “the signs of articulation” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001: 41) in any text form the basis for later articulations of the same ideological discourses into other texts. In other words, and just like critical discourse analysis, social semiotics shares a concern for understanding the ways in which textual or communicative practices are implicated in broader social processes and structural inequalities. We finish this brief analytical framing by noting also that a broadly social semiotic approach views communication as being always transformative in that it projects and proposes “possibilities of social and semiotic forms, entities and processes which reorient, refocus, and ‘go beyond,’ by extending and transforming what there was before the interaction” (Kress 2010: 34; see also Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). Kress uses the term translation as the superordinate term for “moving” meaning “within” and “across” modes. Movement of meaning within modes, for which he reserves the term transformation, involves

Word-things and Thing-words

189

changes in representation with no change in mode (e.g., translation of a novel from English to German); the latter involves moving across modes (e.g., from image to speech) and is labeled transduction (see also Eisenlohr, Chapter 11, this volume) – which bears some relation to Jakobson’s (1959: 233) notion of intersemiotic translation or transmutation, which is concerned in particular with “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Largely for the sake of convenience and wider intelligibility, we are favoring the term transmodalization for the semiotic or metasemiotic processes at work in the illustrative, empirical examples that follow. Setting the Scene: The Alchemy of Frequent Flying As we say, our own work has sought to understand current (re)formulations of class status by examining the performative logics of privilege and status in the context of super-elite travel (e.g., Jaworski and Thurlow 2009; Thurlow and Jaworski 2012, 2014, 2017a). Through the analytic lenses of social semiotics and critical discourse studies, we have been documenting some of the linguistic, visual, spatial, and artifactual resources commonly deployed in the elitist performances of individuals and in the stylizations of elitism by marketers and other commercial agents. (Most recently, we have also started considering affective, poetic, and psychic dimensions; see Thurlow 2016.) Our concern throughout is to address the way status and privilege are situated, interactional processes, rather than essentially fixed, individualized attributes or social categories (Bourdieu 1984). What an approach like ours is able to demonstrate is that elitism is more than simply a material or economic reality; it is also an ideal, ideology, or rhetoric in relation to which all consumer-citizens, seemingly regardless of their tangible wealth or measurable power, are constantly persuaded and taught to position themselves. And, we suggest, one of the ways this takes place – or, rather, takes hold – is through the skillful, almost magical transmodalizing acts of marketers and other agents of capital. One obvious but highly indicative site in the contemporary organization of super-elite mobilities is airline frequent-flier programs, something we attended to early on in our research on elite discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski 2006). It is here that we witness how the production of privilege and status is grounded in some quite apparent transmodal practices – akin to the alchemic power to transmute base metals into gold, turning something banal into something spectacular, something worthless into something precious. In this regard, a striking feature of frequent-flyer programs is the uniform labeling of their membership tiers; regardless of country of origin, they invariably rely on the status symbolism of precious metals and gemstones. We have the following examples:

190

Language and Materiality

Good

Better

Best?

Silver Prestige Crystal Diamond Gold

Gold Elite Sapphire Silver Diamond Gold Prestige

Platinum Super Elite Diamond Gold Diamond Gold Elite

The common use of silver, gold. and platinum deploys what Goffman (1951: 298) calls “natural scarcity” as a rhetorical tactic for restricting (and/or policing) the boundaries of elite statuses, making people recognize their place in the order of things and keeping them in it. (The example Goffman gives is of flawless diamonds, which are infrequently found in nature.) The literal-cumiconic scarcity of certain materials thus provides one kind of guarantee that the number of people who acquire these objects will not be so large as to render the objects useless as symbols for the expression of distinction. In these terms, it is the metaphoric – but consequential – transposition of material qualities to the elite frequent-flyer membership statuses that creates the sense of their being rare and therefore exclusive. Sometimes, as we see above, words are still needed for additionally qualifying and escalating things: for example, where the entry-level status is gold, usefully floating signifiers such as “prestige” and “elite” are deployed. Another kind of lexical excess – or inflation – can be seen in the tautological “diamond,” “silver diamond,” and “gold diamond.” Not all status symbolism hinges on natural scarcity, of course. The super-elite mobilities of frequent fliers are awash with these kinds of transmodal practices: semioticizing things or stuff into words, and materializing words into objects and things. All of this hinges on a complex, but oddly precarious, syntagmatic coalition of signs and practices – what Scollon (2001) terms a nexus of practice: an intersection of different, repeatable practices that are recognized as a specific genre of activity by the group of people engaging in the practices. It is only in this way that we can – and people presumably do – make sense of the snippets of cheap, blue or red carpeting in the run-up to business and firstclass check-in desks at airports, with matching, color-coded signage, orchids on the counters, and dreamlike images of premium seating (see Image 10.1). These materialized experiences are attainable by a few, unimaginable for many, but potentially desired by all.2 Outside their elaborately narrated – which is to say verbalized – environment, however, these semiotic displays may appear both pointless and worthless. Further evidence of the strategic semioticizingmaterializing games of frequent-flyer programs is to be found in the constantly promoted and enumerated “privileges” and “rewards”; take the following typical examples: priority check-in greater baggage allowance

Word-things and Thing-words

191

better seating more legroom special menus escorts/chauffeurs upgrades exemption from restrictions more/direct access comfort special attention recognition greater choice luxury So-called premium c]stomers or members of frequent-flyer programs are promised these kinds of incentives. With some incentives there is unquestionably a literal materiality (e.g., more legroom and special food), and many of the service-related or procedural incentives offered also have an inherent practicality to them, such as priority check-in. Nevertheless, what is noticeable from the list above is how the “stuff” on offer slides craftily from more tangible goods or services to more subjective, open-ended notions such as “comfort,” “special assistance/attention,” “recognition,” and the notoriously elusive “luxury.” These, for us, are all meta-semiotic indexes that nicely illustrate Silverstein’s (2003) principle of the double arrow of indexicality by which every sign is understood to presuppose something and entail something when it is used

Image 10.1 Korean Air check-in counter at Seattle-Tacoma airport

192

Language and Materiality

(see also Keane 2003). In other words, every sign carries information about who produced it and about who is selected to be its recipient, even though this information may not be immediately apparent (see Blommaert 2013 for more). Every sign thus points backwards to its origins and forwards to its addressees. This idea is useful because it points us to past/historical presuppositions conventionally carried by signs/texts and to the ways intended addressees understand them on the basis of the entailments they trigger. As repositories of past meanings and vehicles for future meanings, therefore, we understand lists such as those above directing the bodies of “tiered” frequent flyers through designated spaces, offering them “experiences” exclusive to their status and unattainable to those not (yet) incentivized. In many ways, the language of frequent-flier programmes are reminiscent of Urciuoli’s (2003) analysis of terms such as excellence, skills, leadership, diversity, and rigor, in the marketing materials of a university. These are all terms we might call floating signifiers (Lévi-Strauss 1987 [1950]: 63–64), but for which Urciuoli uses the label strategically deployable shifters (SDS); in other words, lexical items or expressions that are, as Urciuoli (2003: 396) herself explains, “deployed in different discursive fields so that, in effect, people using term X in a referring expression in field A are engaged in a different pragmatic activity from those using the formally identical term X in a referring expression in field B. The salient interpretation of the term depends on the relation of its user to its audience and so shifts with context; in that sense SDSs have shifter-like qualities.” In these ways, we see airline marketers peddling the unmeasurable, but deliberately intangible. These semiotic-material floating signifiers or shifters help organize the discursive field of super-elite travel as social facts that grow out of and refer to actual social practices. They not only naturalize the inequality of social practices but also establish the framework of loyalty through the entextualization of semiosis-shaping spaces, interactions, and bodies, shifting between linguistic, spatial and embodied “experiences.” The somewhat random lists of “privileges” and “rewards” constitute a matrix of semiotic ideologies (Keane 2003) that animates and acculturates frequent-fliers into participating in the airlines’ loyalty programs. Following Agha (2015), we sense how the different tiers of elite travelers are construed not simply by labeling them with specific lexical items drawn from a rarefied semantic-cum-material field but also by creating (entailing) a particular metasemiotic framework formulating their personas, real or imagined, and distancing them from the “ordinary” travellers in a number of different ways: segregating them spatially and offering them a myriad of verbal and interactional commodities such as politeness formulas, personal forms of address, smiles, and escorts. This self-mediating assemblage of semiotic resources constitutes a major “nexus of practice” (Scollon 2001) in the world of super-elite travel; it is also one that is remarkably tenacious and

Word-things and Thing-words

193

self-perpetuating as we demonstrate in the next two sections analyzing specific data examples. Thing-Words: “Bronze” One of the ways we have sought to keep our work on super-elite mobilities and luxury travel critically or politically sound has been continually to address our own participation in these practices and our own complicit role in the maintenance of elitist discourses. We are, of course, also convinced of the empirical validity this ethnographic perspective offers. To this end, and as an extension of the transmodal practices introduced a moment ago, we offer the story of Crispin’s being “bronzed” by British Airways. This is also where we explicitly take up the heuristic device of thing-words and word-things to characterize the way objects and material substances are “wordified” and the way words and communicative practices are “thingified.” This section illustrates the ways we have each of us been thinking through the expansive rhetorics of elite status (Thurlow 2016; Thurlow and Jaworski 2012, 2014, 2017a, 2017b) and the global circulation of semiotic materials and/or “language objects” (Jaworski 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Thurlow 2015; Thurlow and Aiello 2007). In these cases, and across an array of multi-sited, multi-genre evidence, we find the boundary between language and materiality being complexly and, often strategically, blurred. A few years ago, Crispin received a square, metallic-looking, bronze-colored envelope that contained a piece of similarly shiny, bronze-colored paper and, on its reverse, a “letter” from the Executive Club, British Airways’ frequent-flyer program (Image 10.2a and b). The letter began, “Dear Dr. Faber, I’m delighted to present you with your Bronze membership card and luggage tags.” (Crispin’s legal family name is Faber.) The “letter” is signed – with “warm regards” – by James Hillier, the company’s Global Executive Club Proposition Manager. Also enclosed in the envelope was a square card detailing the “privileges” Crispin would now “enjoy as a Bronze Member” (see Image 10.2c), along with two bronze-colored plastic luggage tags slipped into another slightly thicker, similarly bronze-colored card (see Image 10.2d). It was the ultimate performative speech act: Crispin had, in that moment, been declared “elite” and became consubstantial with the metal of the tier to which he has been admitted. This is how Crispin remembers the moment of his elevation: The morning these arrived in the mail, I hastily – and unthinkingly – attached one of the tags to my usual carry-on bag. I stood looking at it with a mixture of relief, pride, and glee. And then I got to thinking . . . It’s a piece of plastic, for goodness sake. Not even real leather in the strap. And besides, it’s bronze. Fake bronze. And only bronze. How desperate was that? Was I really going to be seen touting – bragging about – this in public? How the others would sneer – the silver and gold “members.” I was after

194

Language and Materiality

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Image 10.2a-d Crispin’s Bronze membership letter from British Airways all still sitting in coach class most of the time. For all my frequent flying, I was still a professor who couldn’t really afford anything more. Who’s also not really supposed to want this kind of stuff in the first place. The tag came off at once. I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw them away, however, disingenuously reassuring myself that they could now be repurposed, resemioticized as “data.”

What British Airways had very cleverly done by fabricating a new bronze tier was simply to extend its reach to an even wider field of travelers. Under the

Word-things and Thing-words

195

sycophantic guise of wanting to bestow certain customers with the “proper recognition and reward” that they so clearly deserve, British Airways forged a hitherto unknown/unused aspirational tier in the typical scheme of frequentflier programs, simultaneously lowering the bar while making people feel like they are on the podium nonetheless. And here lies the genius of this marketing ploy and the problem for a newly anointed elite member. The iconic indexicals (or indexical icons) delivered to Crispin in the British Airways packet – the bronze-colored envelope, the plastic membership card and the luggage tags, even the proclamation of his “bronze” status – were an attempt by the airline to create value by conferring the socially and culturally shared perceptions of the quality of bronze object, their qualia (see articles in Chumley and Harkness 2013) – toughness, durability, and resistance – onto the materially incongruent artifacts (plastic, fake leather, paper) and onto him. Indeed, despite his fleeting moment of pride, and despite their mimetic design and aestheticization, the ‘materials’ delivered to Crispin in the British Airways packet were unavoidably disappointing because they did not match his own/differently privileged frame of reference. He quickly realized that in producing these “qualisigns of value” (Munn 1986), British Airways was construing him as complicit in its production of hierarchies and inequalities, while counting on his continued efforts to attain the next tier of elite status in order, of course, to make the company money. This was about boosting Crispin’s ego and their profits. As with the slippery “privileges” of frequent-flier programs (see above), we see again how the toggling between modalities – the linguistic and material, the plastic and metallic, the symbolic and iconic – is central to the staging of distinction and the production of prestige and status. What we have here is the transformation of material trinkets into something desirable and valuable. By the same token, we see how the verbal (“mere words”) is made to seem so consequential and worthy. All of which artfully conceals the structural and economic under the guise of the agentful and aesthetic. Ultimately, and returning to the observations by Lash and Lury (2007) in our introduction, these are also the on-the-ground tactics by which the traditional superstructure and base are collapsed into each other. As they explain, we are increasingly living in a world where “goods become informational, work becomes affective, property becomes intellectual and the economy generally becomes more cultural.” (ibid.: 7) And in this “culturification of industry” (ibid.: 9) we witness both how the physical stuff of commerce circulates as experiences and feelings and how they enter our lives in often quite intimate ways, as we see next. Word-Things: “Happy Birthday!” For several years, Adam has been receiving a birthday card from Lufthansa (see Images 10.3a-c) or, more specifically, from its marketing division. It was evidently produced as a form of “recognition” linked to his Senator (or “gold”)

196

Language and Materiality

(a)

(b)

(c)

Image 10.3a-c Adam’s Senator birthday card from Lufthansa

Word-things and Thing-words

197

status in the airline’s frequent-flier program. We reproduce the inside message of just one of the cards (2015) as a typical example: Dear Prof. Jaworski, Today you are the centre of attention. And on this very special day, we wish you many wonderful moments for you to look back on with pleasure. We wish you a very Happy Birthday and look forward to welcoming you back on board with us soon. Your sincerely, [signature] All the birthday cards and their envelopes have, so far, been produced with high-quality card stock, and all with their own elaborate inserts. All bear a goldcolored tab with the word “Senator” printed next to the right-hand edge. Also golden are the preprinted cover sentiments (e.g., A very special day) and the embellishments, such as the rim of the first card and the “pop-out” sun image in the most recent card, alongside the sentiment Because today the sun shines specially for you. In Image 10.3c, the metal paper clip holding the card together (with the word “Senator” embossed on its back) is, needless to say, a more patently metallic golden. Once again, we see how the design of the cards chimes with the construction of the cards as qualisigns, tapping into the imagery of gold as a rare and valuable commodity; this styling can be regarded as having the intended “indexically entailing effect or creative power to index consubstantial traits” (Silverstein 2003: 226) on Adam as the recipient of the card. Like the one shown here, two of the other cards Adam received possessed another key material and materializing characteristic as a performance – and, indeed, literal manifestation – of “special attention” and “recognition”: they were handwritten and signed by an official in blue ink.3 In her paper about greeting cards, Jaffe refers to Danet’s observations about the social aesthetics of letter writing and the cultural value attached to both good-quality paper and handwriting: specifically, Danet (1997: 9) notes how “handwriting is one of the physical aspects of texts that gives them an ‘aura’ linked to the ‘history of the hands that have touched them’” (Jaffe 1999: 119). The fountain pen used to write the Lufthansa messages certainly materializes a sense of tradition, attention to detail/quality, and, of course, distinction. The mediational affordance of blue ink likewise distinguishes the written text – and the act of production – from the mechanical formality and anonymity of (predominantly black) print in most corporate texts.

198

Language and Materiality

Clearly, the attention to detail and the material choices in composing these personalized messages speak of the sender’s own values and self-positioning. The enregistered mediational means (see Jones 2009) employed in the birthday cards produce an emergently presupposable second-order indexicality of the sender’s own sophistication and distinction. As Silverstein (2003: 216) notes with regard to the use of honorifics, “to manifest fineness of usage is to indicate how very much one deserves deference oneself!” All of which positions the recipient in complex – perhaps, even confusing – ways. As Adam recounts, When the first card arrived, I was expecting another official communiqué about my miles status. On opening the envelope, however, I was quite simply “struck by speech” (Frake 1972; Matoesian 2005) or, rather, by the semiotic object that lay before me. The elaborate performance of interpersonal intimacy in the choice of the longhand script produced – for a moment – a slight pang in my stomach. When I pulled the card from the envelope and read it for the first time, rather than feeling a “golden” glow of opportunities, I found the airline’s effort mildly intrusive if amusing, resulting in a slight recoil of my body. Looking at the card two years later, it still produces a mix of wonder and confusion over the apparent incongruity of the personalization of the message and its marketing motivation.

Sending a birthday card to customers as a marketing device is, of course, not wholly uncommon; we have both of us received them from banks, car dealers, and hotels. They are nonetheless ideal examples of the different materialities and appeals to materiality we have been considering in this chapter: the specific communicative practices of transmodalization and the broader cultural phenomenon by which representation, commodification, and objectification are blurred. In this last regard, Jaffe (1999) also discusses how greeting cards inevitably complicate the boundary between commodities and gifts, as well as blurring or mixing public and private domains. Sliding between pure gift and pure commodity, the instrumental, transactional nature of the Lufthansa cards is underscored by their design (e.g., branding; see Shankar, Chapter 5, this volume), register (e.g., formal address form), and verbal content (e.g., “welcoming you on board”). Yet, and especially in a wider world of metaphysical materialism, the transmodal toggling between – or mixing of – linguistic, visual, and material resources sustains the cards’ ambiguity and thus their alchemic allure. Tying Things Together: Multimodality and Semiotic Ideologies Our concern with examining the reproduction of social hierarchies by focusing on the top end of the social spectrum is driven by the following sentiment expressed by Mary Douglas (1988: 24) some time ago: “Unless we know why people need luxuries and how they use them we are nowhere near taking the problems of inequality seriously.” We furthermore believe that a social semiotic approach – especially one inflected with a reflexive, ethnographic perspective –

Word-things and Thing-words

199

is especially well suited to understanding the contemporary political economy of privilege, as well as its symbolic-cum-phenomenological workings. We certainly begin to see how small-scale, everyday semiotic practices are indicative and constitutive of larger cultural processes such as the pursuit of symbolic capital through consumption of status and distinction; we also start to understand how, so to speak, the rhetorics of elitism get into our heads and under our skin. And, as we have argued elsewhere, “by failing to acknowledge and address this, we fail to understand how powerfully elitist discourses work their magic and how privilege casts its spell” (Thurlow 2016: 12). The analysis/critique we advanced here is not miles away from the theorization of language ideologies from within linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, alluded to earlier. As rationalizations about the use and status of language, language ideologies are, as Gal argues “never only about language . . . and have semiotic properties that provide insights into the workings of ideologies more generally” (Gal 2005: 24). Language ideologies persist over time and are rarely questioned, but can be easily refashioned and transferred in the form of familiar “topoi” from one powerful group to another. Thus the construal of a particular way of talking by (or talking about) social actors is based on normative values that link alternative linguistic and other semiotic forms (gestures, body posture, clothing, artifactual display, arrangement of space, etc.) to competing systems that can be manipulated to suit the interests of particular individuals or groups of people. Prestigious dialects, for example, may indicate one’s privileged position in society and facilitate access to a range of symbolic and material scarce resources (e.g., high-paying jobs, political influence); professional registers (e.g., medical and legal) arise from long-term education, and the degree of their mastery indexes a particular status within a profession; other registers can be linked to different types of social personas or practices. For example, and particularly germane for our analysis here, Silverstein discusses expert “wine talk,” which he refers to as oinoglossia, whose mastery may be treated as a mark of distinction in a particular regime of class and consumerism because it is culturally Eucharistic. Following the comments already quoted above, he further explains: As we consume the wine and properly (ritually) denote that consumption, we become, in performative realtime, the well-bred, characterologically interesting (subtle, balanced, intriguing, winning, etc.) person iconically corresponding to the metaphorical “fashion of speaking” of the perceived register’s figurations of the aesthetic object of connoisseurship, wine. . . . This . . . oinoglossic register exists in a complex, interlocking set of institutionally formed macrosociological interests. These constitute a functioning market of production/circulation/consumption of the aesthetically-constru(ct)ed objects the interlocking structure of which is, in effect, made manifest in the indexical values and stereotypes of oinoglossic words and expressions, whether used in proper textual genre or not, whether used “straight” or with a further superposed (even higher-indexical-order)

200

Language and Materiality

wink. . . . Elites and would-be elites in contemporary society seek to use these enregistered forms; using them confers (indexically entails) an aspect of eliteness-beforeprestige-commodities, of which “distinction” is made. (Silverstein 2003: 226, emphasis in original)

Not unlike oinoglossia, the uptake, or taking the ownership, of the register of frequent-flyer programs by their target consumers turns them into a distinct brand of airline passengers. These metasemiotic, multimodal practices function as social indexicals of class distinction. Different tiers of frequent-flyer status membership are principally defined by the number of accumulated “status points” awarded according to the number and “class” of the purchased tickets. However, following Agha (2011), the commodity formulation is designed to “add value” and performatively link the commodity (status membership) and its consumers to specific types of persons and use, differentiating them from others within the framework of privilege and elitism. The word-things and thing-words delivered to target consumers are part of a chain of commodity formulations – metasigns – that imply specific models of conduct for their users. The materialization of the metasigns in airline marketing discourse follows the imagery of its linguistic labels (“bronze, “gold,” etc.) and reinforces contrasts between consumers with access to these typified products as “bronze members,” “gold members,” and so on. Luxury landscapes are, we have noted, awash with stuff – aural, visual, spatial, material, and otherwise. Indeed, a quintessential performance of luxury continues to be displays of excess and plenty – even if it is plenty of silence (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010b, 2012). Indeed, a very fine line – if any – is to be drawn between the linguistic and the material, between the symbolic and the iconic. Certainly, as far as all the things or objects are concerned, it is often their inutility – their frivolity – that renders them powerful. It is not the practical affordances or physical substance of objects that necessarily or really count; rather it is their expressive function that is almost always more or solely important – and perhaps also their affective and psychic properties (see Thurlow 2016). The indexicals of privilege, prestige and status (or any other “value”) that we appropriate and display come with “instructions” in the form of metadiscursive marketing texts (i.e., semiotic ideologies) and gain currency in our social performances of consumption; for example, by standing on the patch of blue or red carpet at check-in or inquiring about the possibility of getting an aisle seat in the emergency exit row. The point is that, to follow the likes of Arjun Appadurai (1986) and Rom Harré (2002), such objects and embodied practices are most commonly given meaning and, paradoxically, substance by being woven into the narrative performances of super-elite travel and within the wider symbolic orders of class, privilege, and status. In turn, these transient story-lines powerfully rearrange and reinforce the order of things and, of course, the ordering of people.

Word-things and Thing-words

201

N OT E S 1 For a more careful, critical accounting for the term “super-elite” see Thurlow (2016). Suffice it to say, this is a very relative notion but one that starts from the premise that all travel-by-choice is privileged and/or elite (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010); although this is not to say that mobility of this kind is easily and equally attainable by all – far from it. 2 Image 10.1 shows the Korean Air check-in counters at the Seattle-Tacoma airport (from Jaworski and Thurlow 2013). All fieldwork photographs are our own. Other images are quoted extracts from the original advertisements and used fairly for the purposes of scholarly comment/critique. The British Airways and Lufthansa images are photographs of the unsolicited materials sent to us in the mail; again, we use these on the principle of fair use. 3 We know from a cursory search of the internet that Lufthansa’s handwriting tactic cast its spell widely and effectively, with one microblogger summing it all up nicely: “@lufthansa sent a handwritten birthday card. Class.”

REFERENCES Agha, Asif. 2011. “Commodity registers.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(1): 22–53. 2015. “Tropes of branding in forms of life.” Signs and Society 3(S1): S174–S194. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan. 2013. Chronicles of Complexity: Ethnography, Superdiversity, and Linguistic Landscapes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. R. Nice, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chumley, Lily HOpe and Nicholas Harkness, eds. 2013. Qualia. Special issue of Anthropological Theory 13: 1–2. Danet, Brenda. 1997. “Books, letters, documents: The changing aesthetics of texts in late print culture.” Journal of Material Culture 2(1): 5–39. Douglas, Mary. 1988. In the Active Voice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Featherstone, Mike. 2014. “Super-rich lifestyles.” In Elite Mobilities, edited by T. Birtchnell and J. Caletrío, 99–135. London: Routledge. Frake, C. 1972. ““Struck by speech”: The Yakan concept of litigation.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics, J. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes, 106–129. New York: Holt. Gal, Susan. 2005. “Language ideologies compared: Metaphors of public/private.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 23–37. Gibson, James J. 1986. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press. Goffman, E. 1951. “Symbols of class status.” British Journal of Sociology 2/4: 294–304. Harré, Rom. 2002. “Material objects as social worlds.” Theory, Culture & Society 19(5&6): 22–33. Jaffe, A. 1999. “Packaged sentiments: The social meanings of greeting cards.” Journal of Material Culture 4(2): 115–141.

202

Language and Materiality

Jakobson, Roman. 1959. “On linguistic aspects of translation.” In On Translation, edited by R. A. Brower, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jaworski, Adam. 2014. “Welcome: Synthetic personalization and commodification of sociability in the linguistic landscape of global tourism.” In Challenges for Language Education and Policy: Making Space for People, edited by B. Spolsky, O. Inbar, and M. Tannenbaum, 214–231. London: Routledge. 2015a. “Globalese: A new visual-linguistic register.” Social Semiotics 25(2): 217– 235. 2015b. “Word cities and language objects: “Love” sculptures and signs as shifters.” Linguistic Landscape 1(1–2): 75–94. Jaworski, Adam and Crispin Thurlow. 2009. “Taking an elitist stance: Ideology and the discursive production of social distinction.” In Perspectives on Stance, edited by A. Jaffe, 195–226. New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. “The (de-)centering spaces of airports: Framing mobility and multilingualism.” In Peripheral Multilingualism, edited by S. Pietikäinen and H. Kelly-Holmes, 154– 198. New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, Rodney H. 2009. “Dancing, skating and sex: Action and text in the digital age.” Journal of Applied Linguistics 6(3): 283–302. Jones, Rodney H. and S. Norris. 2005. “Introducing mediational means/cultural tools.” In Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, edited by S. Norris and R. H. Jones, 49–51. London: Routledge. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the social analysis of material things.” Language & Communication 23: 409–425. Kockelman, Paul. 2006. “Residence in the world: Affordances, instruments, actions, roles, and identities.” Semiotica 162(1/4): 19–71. Kress, Gunther. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold. Lash, Scott and Celia Lury. 2007. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Cambridge: Polity. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1987 [1950]. Introduction to Marcel Mauss. London: Routledge. Matoesian, Gregory. 2005. “Struck by speech: Embodied stance in jurisdictional discourse.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(2): 167–193. Munn, Nancy. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society (Papua New Guinea). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scollon, Ron. 2001. “Action and text: Towards an integrated understanding of the place of text in social (inter)action, mediated discourse analysis and the problem of social action.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by R. Wodak and M. Meyer, 139–184. London: Sage. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life.” Language & Communication. 23: 193–229. 2006. “Pragmatic indexing.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, Volume 6, edited by Keith Brown, 14–17. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Thurlow, Crispin. 2015. “Multimodality, materiality and everyday textualities: The sensuous stuff of status.” In Handbook of Intermediality: Literature, Image, Sound, Music, edited by G. Rippl, 619–636. Frankfurt am Main: De Gruyter.

Word-things and Thing-words

203

2016. “Queering critical discourse studies or/and performing new post-class ideologies.” Critical Discourse Studies. doi:10.1080/17405904.2015.1122646 Thurlow Crispin and G. Aiello. 2007. “National pride, global capital: A social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry.” Visual Communication 6: 305–344. Thurlow, Crispin and Adam Jaworski. 2006. “The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: Symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes.” Discourse & Society 17(1): 131–167. 2010a. Tourism Discourse: The Language of Global Mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2010b. “Silence is golden: Elitism, linguascaping and “anti-communication” in luxury tourism discourse.” In Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, edited by A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow, 187–218. London: Continuum. 2012. “Elite mobilities: The semiotic landscapes of luxury and privilege.” Social Semiotics 22(5): 487–516. 2014. “Visible-invisible: The social semiotics of labour in luxury tourism.” In Elite Mobilities, edited by T. Birtchnell and J. Caletrío, 176–193. London: Routledge. 2017a. “The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics.” Discourse & Society 28(5). 2017b. “Elite Discourse: The Rhetorics of Status, Privilege, and Power.” Special issue of Social Semiotics 27(3). Urciuoli, B. 2003. “Excellence, leadership, skills, diversity: Marketing liberal arts education.” Language & Communication 23: 385–408. van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. 2014. “Parametric systems: The case of voice quality.” In The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, 2nd edition, edited by C. Jewitt, 76–85. London: Routledge. van Lier, Leo. 2004. The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: a sociocultural perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Veblen, Thorstein. 1994 [1899]. A Theory of the Leisure Class. Mineola, NY: Dover.

11

Language and Materiality in the Renaming of Indigenous North American Languages and Peoples∗ Robert Moore

Introduction Saussure’s (1966 [1916]) famous dichotomy between langue (roughly, “grammar”) and parole (roughly, “speech”), and his idea that only the former could be the subject matter of linguistics (Agha 2007a), did not so much originate the concept of a strict separation between language and the material world – already long in circulation – as rechristen it in a newly axiomatic form. For Saussure, langue, which he saw as the “social” dimension of language, was the only suitable object of linguistic study; parole was just too “individual,” too concrete, too variable, and too enmeshed in materiality to be amenable to study. Saussurean parole comprises an open-ended (and, in principle, infinite) series of utterances and vocalizations, each one containing more or less defective “replicas” (“sinsigns” in Peircean parlance) or token-instances of the real objects of study: linguistic signs, located in langue, and as such inaccessible to direct observation. In a later idiom of descriptivist linguistics, actual speech presents an ocean of “allophonic realizations”; the real objects of study, the phonemes – possessed not of material but of “psychological” reality (Sapir 1949 [1933]) – reside elsewhere. In this chapter I develop two distinct but related lines of argument, both of which center on ways that language manifests itself as a material fact: (a) utterances-as-written (or printed, or texted, or keyed in) are materially

∗

This is a revision of a paper first presented in an invited panel on “Language Commodification and Circulation in Global Capitalism,” organized by Jillian Cavanaugh and Shalini Shankar at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 16, 2012. Several people contributed in several ways to its subsequent improvement, though none of them should be blamed for its obvious shortcomings: Paul Kroeber supplied a key term and provided insight into Salishan matters, Erin Debenport generously shared her knowledge of various Pueblo cases, Kristen A. Carpenter of the University of Colorado Law School provided valuable help with American Indian trademark law specifically and intellectual property law in general, and Travis Bruner offered useful comments. I am grateful to the editors for their suggestions, support, and generosity.

204

North American Languages and Peoples

205

incarnated in text artifacts (Silverstein and Urban 1996); and (b) utterances-asspoken, though less durable, are no less physically real, because they manifest themselves in the concrete sensuous materiality of sound. Building on recent literature in linguistic anthropology1 and allied fields, this chapter addresses one important aspect of the intertwining of language and materiality in political economies that link local communities with global circulations of value: the politics (and economics) of naming. Here I am concerned primarily with proper names: names that designate North American Native languages, and names that designate the collectivities of people associated with them, the latter conceived (and self-conceived) as social groups of various sorts (in the United States, federally recognized tribes; in Canada, First Nations). Starting in the early 1990s, many of the languages and tribal groups familiar from anthropological literature were rechristened: the Kwakiutl language was renamed Kwak’wala and the people Kwakwaka’wakw; the Nootka became the Nuu-chah-nulth; the Papago became the Tohono O’odham; the Ojibwa became the Anishinaabe; and Iroquoian-speaking groups once known collectively as Mohawk adopted various Native names, including Kahnawake and Akwesasne. The phenomenon is by no means unique to North America. The region spanning the northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and a northwest corner of Russia, once known as Lapland, is now also known as Sápmi; the people once called Lapps are now usually identified as Sámi (sometimes Saami), and the languages are also known as Sámi. Meanwhile, the Basque language – now known as Euskara – has collected around itself a group of language activists known as Euskalzaleak, people “best thought of not as an ethnic group or as a linguistic community in the usual sense of the term, but as a political affinity group” (Urla 2012). Urla’s observation should alert us to broader sociopolitical transformations of which the name changes are but a symptom. The social groups and the linguistic varieties designated by the new names are being constituted in new ways. For this reason alone, the ideologies that underwrite the name changes, and the discursive practices that the new names enable, demand our attention. After sketching the dimensions of the problem in social semiotic terms, I briefly survey a sample of post-1990 name changes of Native North American languages and tribal groups. Through an examination of a single text, I then show how alternation between the older name and the newer name in discourse (parole) indexes an alternation between (at least) two voicing structures, each of which performatively aligns the speaker (or author) and the addressee (or reader) with respect to the language and the cultural tradition in distinct and incommensurable ways. I then address the problematic status of tribal names as a form of intellectual property, opening the way for a speculative discussion of the wider sociopolitical implications of these (re)naming practices.

206

Language and Materiality

Who’s in a Name? The special status of proper names among linguistic expressions deserves to be noted. For whether they designate individuals (personal names), groups (ethnonyms), languages (glossonyms), places (toponyms), or products and services (brand names), proper names seem especially susceptible to objectification – or, perhaps better, objectualization (Silverstein 1984) – and to becoming entangled thereby in market economies, when compared with other linguistic expressions. The vice president of Corporate Communications for Coca Cola recently put it this way: “If all of Coca Cola’s assets were destroyed overnight, whoever owned the Coca Cola name could walk into a bank the next morning and get a loan to rebuild everything” (quoted in Muzellec 2006: 305). Why this intimate link between proper names and objectual forms of value? Formally, proper names are lexical primes – as expressions, they are clearly bounded and unavoidably (one might say, compulsively) referential. Whether composed of one word (Fido) or several (Frederick William John Augustus Hervey, 7th Marquess of Bristol), they cohere as a unit, and the meaning of the whole cannot be deduced from the meaning of the parts, which is to say they are semantically noncompositional (or, holophrastic) – they are idioms, in other words. Functionally, they are what Kripke (1972) called rigid designators: indexical expressions that refer to their objects across all possible worlds (Nakassis 2012: 7; Lee 1997: 67–90; Agha 2007b: 66–68). Most important of all, proper names are deictic expressions – what Agha (2007b: 65–68), building on the work of Kripke, Putnam, and others, calls speech-chain deictics. The link between a proper name and its referent, originating in a baptismal event, “is a regularity that holds for a social domain of persons” – hence, “the general mechanism by which knowledge of a name-referent pairing spreads” from the small group of people present at the baptismal event to larger and larger groups is “through further speech events whereby the fact that the name is now the name of a particular person may be learned by others” (ibid.: 66). These further speech events constitute what Agha calls a speech chain. “Co-membership in a speech chain network,” Agha writes, “depends not on knowing one another but on having something common in one’s discursive history” (ibid.: 67). So names are “idioms” both in their semantics and in their (meta)pragmatics – if the two can even be distinguished (see Basso 1988). The only way to illuminate the metapragmatics of a proper name is to study actual examples of its interested use. Because we are here concerned with metapragmatic relationships between two names, an old name and a new one, it is indispensable to examine a text by a single author who uses both the old name and the new name, alternating between them, treating them as what we might call (pending further specification) near-synonyms.

North American Languages and Peoples

207

A sample textual analysis of this kind is presented later, but one of its central findings deserves to be stated at the outset: it is essential to see that the new names, here termed “neotraditionalist,”2 do not replace the old names, but instead enter into a dialogic relationship with them (Bakhtin 1981 [1934– 1935]). This juxtaposition of neotraditionalist Native names with preexisting names enables acts of citation (Derrida 1988; Nakassis 2012) that have both indexical and iconic dimensions. By putting the new names into wide circulation in several media (print, the internet, spoken discourse), such performative renominations point indexically to their source (or deictic origo), announcing the (re)arrival or the (re)emergence into public view of a new social group, albeit one that has been “here” since time immemorial – only now speaking for itself, in its own language: this is a claim to “sovereignty” in the discursive realm, at least, as an embodied “voice” (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012: 359–360; see Feld, Chapter 7, this volume). At the same time, the use of neotraditionalist names seems almost to accomplish language revitalization on a micro scale, by creating a situation in which the mere mention of a neotraditional name almost counts as an instance of the use of the (usually, endangered) Native language. This last effect is particularly clear when the written or printed form of the neotraditionalist name presents challenges to (ordinary Anglophone) legibility through the use of unconventional and noncanonical sequences of alphabetic symbols, perhaps with additional diacritic marks and sometimes involving the apparent concatenation of alphabetic symbols with nonalphabetic ones including (Arabic) numerals, erstwhile “punctuation marks,” and the like. We see examples of all these in the later discussion; the immediate point is to see that these effects of iconism have as their semiotic vehicle a fundamental aspect of the names’ materiality: their form or appearance as graphemic (typographical) entities. In the North American context post-1990, the rechristening of indigenous languages and peoples with new, Native-language names frequently entails a number of interrelated claims. In some cases it is claimed that the new name(s) have been in continuous use inside the community, despite the interruptions of conquest, colonialism, and compulsory English-language education, so that the new names are in fact not new – they are older than the old names. Perhaps they are also “our own” names for ourselves or our language, in our own language. Indeed, in some well-known cases the new names are meant to replace derogatory out-group designations (exonyms), as in the renaming of many (but not all) Eskimoan-speaking peoples as Inuit, replacing the Algonquian-derived term Eskimo.3 But often it is more complicated than this. In some cases, the group (an officially recognized U.S. tribe or Canadian First Nation) may not have existed as a self-understood collectivity in pre-reservation times. In other cases, the

208

Language and Materiality

group may have existed as a self-understood collectivity, but simply not ever had a proper name for itself: terms that translate as “people” – quite common in North America – are not always, or even necessarily, proper names, until they are elevated to that status in acts of baptismal (re)nomination (such as the signing of treaties). In other cases, the name may formerly have designated only a subgroup within the larger tribal collectivity that is now being renamed; in still other cases, the neotraditionalist name for a tribe or group may earlier have been a place name (toponym) or a language name (glossonym). In many cases, the notion of “tribe” (Hymes 1968) does not really even apply to the forms of social, residential, village, and political organization that were, and continue to be, relevant in structuring the societies in question. The point is not to evaluate these and other claims for their truth or falsity, but to understand how they serve as important parts of the environment, the “descriptive backing” (Searle 1971: 171) in terms of which the dialectic between old names and new plays itself out in discursive practices. Finally, before embarking on a brief typological survey of name changes, it is useful to recall that the post-1990 wave of renaming coincided historically with major changes in the institutional and legal relationships between (recognized) Indian tribes and the state (in the United States4 and Canada), and with the invention of the new category of “endangered languages” within linguistics (e.g., Hale et al. 1992). This is also about the time that Heller and Duchêne began to notice a shift in ideologies of multilingualism from a discourse of “rights, identity, cultural and linguistic preservation, and pride” to a discourse of “added value” and “economic development” (Heller and Duchêne 2012: 1) – points I revisit in the conclusion. Renaming by Nativization and Suppletion Neotraditionalist tribal names (ethnonyms) and language names (glossonyms) can be put into two large classes on purely formal grounds. Some involve what might be called nativization, the respelling or retranscription of preexisting names to produce phonetically similar (if orthographically divergent) alternatives; others involve what might be called suppletion, the replacement of preexisting names by names that are phonetically and orthographically dissimilar, often radically so. Table 11.1 presents some examples of renaming by nativization of preexisting names. The respelling of “Wasco” as Wasq’u represents a good “phonemic” transcription of this Chinookan word – but there is more to the story. The word is also a common noun meaning “cup”; with the meaning “cup” it is also a toponym, the proper name of a specific bowl-shaped indentation in the basaltic rock on the south bank of the Columbia River into which water bubbled up at

North American Languages and Peoples

209

Table 11.1 Nativization Former Name

Current Name

Comments

Wasco Miami Chilcotin Cherokee Halkomelem Miwok Yakima

Wasq’u myaamia Tsilhq’utin Tsalagi Halq’emélem Mewuk Yakama

“cup”; also a toponym (Chinookan) (Algonquian; Leonard 2011) (Athabaskan; Dinwoodie 1998) (Iroquoian) (Coast Salish; Suttles 1987) (California Penutian) (Sahaptin); reservation in WA

regular intervals. This cup, or Cup, served as a kind of communal well for the permanent winter village nearby, whose residents were known collectively and eponymously as “they [or, we] who have the Cup.” The Chinookan population at Warm Springs consists of descendants of people who resided in this village, but also in many others, including villages on the south bank of the Columbia some fifty miles or more to the west. So the term – now an endonym designating one of the three Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs – has a multistranded history as both a common noun and a proper name (toponym, village name). The respelling of Chilcotin as Tsilhq’utin is likewise implicated in a complex regional history. The term designates as a single collectivity (the Tsilhq’utin Nation) the members of six Athapaskan-speaking bands, most (but not all) of whom reside in a number of small reserves in the interior of British Columbia, in a region known to non-Indians in this part of Canada as The Chilcotin (see Dinwoodie 1998 for details). Dinwoodie describes how one of these bands, known as the Nemiah Valley band (Xeni Gwet’in “people of the valley of Xeni”) issued a “Declaration” in 1989 outlining the geographic boundaries of their ancestral territory in a proposed “Nemiah Aboriginal Wilderness Preserve” (Dinwoodie 1998: 201ff.). The outcome of years of legal wrangling was a 233,000-hectare park named Ts’il?os – the personal name of a mythical character who was transformed into a mountain. The mountain, formerly Mt. Tatlow, was duly renamed Ts’il?os – another complex chain involving personal names (eponymous), toponyms, endoyms, exonyms, and ethnonyms, mediated by myth and negotiated by attorneys. Dinwoodie presents a letter to the editor that appeared in the Vancouver Sun in the aftermath of the settlement, from one H. Musgrave of Vancouver: The B.C. government should be applauded for the new park surrounding Chilko Lake. If the deal was one that the loggers, native Indians, ranchers, miners and even environmentalists could agree on, it is truly a day to celebrate. Hopefully this process could be used again. But by what idiotic process – if any – did they choose the name? Ts’il?os? It’s a nice legend that the name comes from, but the word itself is unpronounceable. Ts’il?os?

210

Language and Materiality

Pronounced Sigh-loss? The last time I checked, English was the language of common verbal communication here. And before the politically correct thought police arrive to falsely accuse me of anti-aboriginal thinking, let me say that I have nothing against using aboriginal names for places. Capilano, Matsqui and Kitsilano are all great names. But please notice that they do not have punctuation in the middle of the word where some letters are supposed to be. So how’s about Chilko Provincial Park instead? Or Chilcotin? Or any name without punctuation in it. (H. Musgrave, quoted in Dinwoodie 1998: 213)

Noting that “Chilcotin is a spelling strongly connected to the nonnative community in the area,” Dinwoodie observes that, in this part of Canada, “place-names of aboriginal derivation are acceptable – even desirable – as long as they are not linked to contemporary aboriginal communities” (1998: 213): This is what is really at issue in relation to the name Tsil?os. The glottal stop, often represented with a question mark in practical orthographies, is ubiquitous in the speech of the peoples indigenous to what is now British Columbia, and completely absent in the orthographic representation of English. The intersection of these two facts makes the glottal stop and the question mark well suited to signaling, to the readers of the Vancouver Sun, Native peoples’ entries into the public sphere. Even in the public contestation of their orthography, Tsilhqut’in people of the Nemiah Valley Indian Band were reassured that something new was coming about. The Nemiah Valley Indian Band had moved from unratified periphery to – at least for a moment – ratified front and center, in dialogue with the provincial government and the national public about the allocation of resources. The recognition was linguistic in public and political behind the scenes. (Dinwoodie 1998: 214)

The case of the large reservation in Washington State changing its name from Yakima to Yakama represents a kind of limit case of what I call “nativization” by respelling: the replacement here of the preexisting -i- with -a- was done to make the name conform to the way it was spelled in the (written) text of the 1855 treaty that established the reservation, the Indian signatories to which contributed their Xs and nothing else. So this case is perhaps more antiquarian than nativist. The case of Miami > myaamia (perhaps better, Miami  myaamia) is discussed later. Renaming by Suppletion (Northwest Coast) Arguably the richest yield of neotraditionalist glossonyms and ethnonyms comes from the Northwest Coast of North America – a few of these (all of them Canadian First Nations) are shown in Table 11.2. The new names bear little or no resemblance to the names they purport to replace. The notion of “tribe” as an internally homogeneous, neatly bounded sociocultural and linguistic unit corresponding to a distinct polity, of course, simply does not apply to Northwest Coast societies like most of those listed in Table 11.2. The ethnonyms Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly Kwakiutl) and

North American Languages and Peoples

211

Table 11.2 Suppletion (Northwest Coast) Former Name

Current Name

Comments

Kwakiutl

Kwakwaka’wakw Kwak’wala Nuu-chah-nulth

ethnonym (17 self-governing Tribes) glossonym (Wakashan) ethnonym (14 Nations) glossonym (Wakashan) ethnonym (Penutian) ethnonym ethnonym (Salishan) glossonym (toponym > ethnonym) (Salishan) (Interior Salish) (also given as In-SHUCK-ch)∗ ethnonym glossonym (Interior Salish)

Nootka T’aat’aaqsepa Tsimshian (Coast) Tsimshian (Nass R.) Saanich (Straits Salish) Bella Coola Lillooet Pemberton Band of Lillooet Shuswap

∗

Sm’algyax Nisga’a Wsánec SencóŦen Nuxalk St’at’imc Nsvq’tsmc Secwepemc Secwepemctsín

See the tribal website at www.inshuckch.com/nsvqtsmc.html.

Nuu-chah-nulth (formerly Nootka), for example, are covering terms for First Nations that comprise seventeen and fourteen self-governing “Tribes” or “Nations,” respectively, each of these centered in a permanent winter village. Nuu-chah-nulth – “all along the mountains and sea,” according to the Tribal Council website5 – appears to be a descriptive epithet. Kwakwaka’wakw is an ethnonym derived from a glossonym: “People who speak Kwak’wala.”6 The Salishan7 examples listed in Table 11.2, one of them coastal (Bella Coola/Nuxalk) and three in the interior, provide good examples of the role played by “globalized” expertise in articulating the intensely “local.” Here, a trio of Dutch linguists – Aert Kuipers, Jan van Eijk, and Henk Nater – have contributed decades of field research and have helped develop practical orthographies for the languages (in addition to writing grammars and dictionaries, assembling text collections, and producing linguistic studies). It was Henk Nater, apparently, who proposed “Nuxalk” as an alternative to “Bella Coola,” though the term “Nuxalk” was originally a toponym designating the Bella Coola River valley and not the entirety of the group’s territory. On the first page of his monumental two-volume ethnography of the (then) Bella Coola, T. F. McIlwraith writes, “Bella Coola” is the common designation of those Indians who, until a few years ago, inhabited the valley of the Bella Coola River in central British Columbia. Boas has recorded that the name is a mis-pronunciation of Bilxula, a Kwakiutl word of doubtful origin which white pioneers assumed to be the appellation of the people in question. There is no term in their own language to include the groups treated in this monograph. (McIlwraith 1992 [1948]: 1)

212

Language and Materiality

Table 11.3 Suppletion (Southwest) Former Name

Current Name

Santo Domingo Pueblo San Juan Pueblo

Kewa Pueblo Name change in 2009 Ohkay Owingeh Name change in 2005 “Place of strong people” To” Hajiilee Name change ca. 2005 “People who draw water from a well” Diné Proposed 1993; rejected “People” in 1994 Tuf Sheur Teui Under discussion (2012) “Green reed people”  Tiwa “People”

Cañoncito Navajo Navajo Sandia Pueblo

Comments

“Nuxalk”, then, may represent a case in which the neotraditional name constitutes an extension of a term to label a group or language recognized by ethnographers, Anglo administrators, and others. Aert Kuipers is responsible for the Shuswap practical orthography in which “Secwepemc” is spelled and confirms that this is the people’s name for themselves (Kuipers 1974); the St’at’imc (formerly Lillooet) orthography was the work of Jan van Eijk, a fact confirmed by the tribe’s website.8 Renaming by Suppletion (Southwest) A very different onomastic regime obtains in the U.S. Southwest, especially with regard to Pueblo groups, a few of which have recently adopted neotraditional names; others are under discussion. Table 11.3 summarizes the facts as I know them. The Navajo are not only the largest of the recognized tribes in the United States in terms of population (300,000+ enrolled members); they come rather close to exemplifying the notion of “tribe,” and there is no doubt that the term diné is the Navajo word for “people” in wide and daily use. It is not necessarily a proper name, however, and not all usages of it denote “Navajo people” as distinct from all others.9 The name change proposal was voted down by the eighty-eight-member Navajo Nation Council in 1994 for reasons not entirely clear, but clearly involving group-internal politics (including electoral politics; 1994 was an election year). The proposed new name seems to have had very different “descriptive backing” for different people in the community. An article in Indian Country Today in January 1994 (Norrell 1994) recorded a wide range of views in opposition to the name change: one member of the Tribal Council said that for him

North American Languages and Peoples

213

the term Diné evoked “an era of suffering which ended with the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo in 1868” and “the exile, starvation, freezing temperatures and disease from 1864 to 1868” (ibid.). Speaking of and for his constituents, the councilman said, “They don’t want to feel the pain again. It’s too late to turn things around. We’re in a modern age now. We will not return to the traditional ways. My 7-year-old son operates a computer” (ibid.). Others invoked a discourse of pride (Duchêne and Heller 2012): Sandra Storer of Tohatchi, N.M., Miss Indian New Mexico, disagrees with Mr. John and supports the change to Dine. “A long time ago we were given this name, Dine, by our Holy People. We should be proud of this name and pass it along to our children. We should be proud of who we are and of our culture,” said Ms. Storer. (Norrell 1994)

Others contacted by the journalist through “random interviews” pointed to the fact that a proper name’s meaning is partly dependent on the context in which it is used: Summer Benally, 19, from Beclabito, N.M., is against the change and says the name Dine is sacred and should be honored as a holy name. “You wouldn’t use your sacred name in public.” Leland Dayzie asked, “Would the Navajo Police want to be called the Dine Police? I don’t think so. It sounds too soft-hearted – like they wouldn’t really enforce the laws.” (Norrell 1994)

In 2005, San Juan Pueblo became Ohkay Owingeh, “Place of strong people”: “We’re not changing the name back, as our elders have pointed out,” said Ohkay Owingeh Gov. Joe Garcia. “We are simply reinstating or restoring our original name because the name has more meaning to us. It’s who we are. And you can’t say that about San Juan Pueblo, because that name was given to us by Spanish conquistadors in honor of John the Baptist.” (McKosato 2005)

The new name did not immediately replace the old one, however: “We will use the term Pueblo of San Juan in parenthesis after Ohkay Owingeh for about another six months. After that, we plan to stop using it altogether,” Garcia said (McKosato 2005). Late in 2009, the tribal council at Santo Domingo Pueblo “quietly, and unanimously, decided to change the pueblo’s name to Kewa Pueblo (Constable 2010): Former pueblo Gov. Everett Chavez, who proposed the name change, said Tuesday that Kewa is how the tribe’s people refer to themselves privately. “Historically, that’s our name,” he said. “Everybody knows us as Kewa. It’s just going back to our original name.” Chavez said the resolution changing the name was fully endorsed by the council. The tribe also hired Zia Graphics in Albuquerque to revise its tribal seal (see Image 11.1). The new seal still depicts cornstalks, but now also features pottery and jewelry styles for which the pueblo is famous. A mission church, prominent in the original seal, now is referenced in a smaller image at the bottom of the circular design.

214

Language and Materiality

Image 11.1 Old seal of Santo Domingo Pueblo and new seal of Kewa Pueblo

In the Pueblo Southwest, the politics of (re)naming is shaped by two interrelated cultural forces, both very old, that do not seem to operate in the same way or to the same degree in other parts of Native North America: secrecy and Catholicism. The influence of the former can be discerned in the way that Pueblo name changes are reported in the local (Anglo) press – the article in the Santa Fé New Mexican announcing the Santo Domingo name change bears the headline, “Pueblo returns to traditional name. Santo Domingo quietly beomes ‘Kewa’” (Constable 2010, emphasis added). The article characterizes the pueblo as “one of New Mexico’s most conservative in terms of customs and culture” and reports, “In fact, the Web site says the tribal government previously had asked that the traditional name not be published” (ibid.)10 : Chavez said there was no formal announcement of the change and that the tribe has been relying on “word of mouth.” He noted that the Spanish also gave various Indian family units Spanish surnames, but that tribal members continued to use their own names privately. Chavez made a point of saying that the renaming is not intended to “demean St. Dominic.” This was, he added, “a long-awaited move back to recognition of ourselves. We were Native first and foremost, before Catholicism and the Spaniards.” (Constable 2010)

Another article in the New Mexican characterizes Ohkay Owingeh as “a conservative and fiercely private Pueblo” and gives a complete listing of the patron saints of each New Mexico Pueblo – all nineteen Pueblos have one, not just those already named for them (San Felipe, San Ildefonso, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, and until recently Santo Domingo; Lockridge 2010). Here, then, is another exhaustively complete system of names, one for each of these “fiercely private” and self-contained polities, each name designating a sanctified person

North American Languages and Peoples

215

Table 11.4 Patterns in the Usage of Miami vs. Myaamia (in Leonard 2011) Miami Tokens (total)

myaamia

244 as ethnonym as glossonym

With we/our/us

62 80% (194) 20% (50)

9 (3% of total) as ethnonym as glossonym

20% (13) 77% (48) 12 (19% of total)

88% (8) 11% (1)

16% (2) 83% (10)

with canonical attributes, attitudes, and a biography. Note how the governor of Kewa Pueblo in 2010 is at pains to avoid giving offense to St. Dominic (1170– 1221). The Navajo case is distinct in many respects, and I take it up in detail later. Miami vs. myaamia: Names in Discourse In a recent essay on Miami language-revitalization efforts in Oklahoma, Wesley Leonard, a linguist, Miami language activist, and enrolled member of the tribe, describes in a footnote his own practice of alternating between the preexisting name Miami and the neotraditionalist endonym myaamia (the latter always italicized and lowercases): myaamia and Miami (pronounced my-AM-ee or my-AM-uh) are functionally equivalent, the former being the name of the language and people in the language (an endonym), and the latter being the exonym used in English and many other languages. As using an endonym has a certain sociopolitical impact in that it asserts a tribal identity, some tribal members make a point of using it. Moreover, as use of the language has become more common, the endonym has likely also become more common because we are more accustomed to saying and hearing it. However, particularly when speaking English, it is common for Miami people to alternate between both terms – perhaps with a general trend toward saying myaamia when referring to an identity or cultural frame, and I am following that convention here. This pattern exemplifies a theme of this article, which is that the Miami are a multicultural and multilingual people, and it thus makes sense that we would refer to ourselves and to our language in more than one language. The spelling of myaamia words in this article, including the noncapitalization of the word myaamia, follows conventions that have developed in the Miami community. (Leonard 2011: 155–156, n2).

My own survey of the use of the two terms in Leonard’s text (11,000 words in total) reveals some interesting patterns (see Table 11.4). Table 11.1 shows that “Miami” is by far more frequently used; it is used 80 percent of the time in reference to the Miami as an ethnic group (references to Miami culture, community, people, distinctive practices, and so on, have been

216

Language and Materiality

lumped in here); myaamia, by contrast, occurs less frequently, but far more often as a designator of the language.11 Usage of the two terms in sentences where they are syntactically linked to a first-person plural (exclusive) pronoun (we in the subject position, us in the object position, our as the possessive) shows another pattern: almost 20 percent of the usages of myaamia are linked to a first-person pronoun, in contrast to only 3 percent of the tokens of “Miami.” What the numbers suggest is an emerging distinction between the two names on the plane of referential indexicality, where usage of myaamia differentially indexes and iconically denotes the language, while “Miami” can be used in reference to the tribe as a federally recognized entity, to its reservation, institutions, cultural practices, and people qua ethnic group. But the numbers also suggest a pattern of Bakhtinian voicing: the indexicality of myaamia is grounded in an indexical origo that is first person, plural, and exclusive: we, our, us. One example will have to suffice – here, myaamia occurs twice, first as a glossonym and then as an ethnonym; “Miami” occurs once, in the plural, as an ethnonym (“we Miamis”): The specific practices I outline reflect that our myaamia language is important to us and that we Miamis are a diverse people, whose practices blend our myaamia background with the English language and elements of the various communities to which we belong. (Leonard 2011: 137; underlining added).

“We Miamis” are – potentially, electively, situationally – myaamia, and as Leonard (2011) persuasively asks, why should it be otherwise? The two stated objectives of Leonard’s essay are “to exemplify several modern Miami language practices that the dominant discourse deems anomalous and to show why they are actually fully normal and expected” (ibid.: 137; emphasis added); taking Leonard at his word, I read “exemplify” literally – hence, my examination of his lexical choices. The neotraditionalist name myaamia absorbs to itself some of the “we”-ness with which it is connected by such recurring co-textual arrays (Agha 2007b) as can be seen in the brief excerpt. Just as with any other pair of distinct proper names for a single entity (think of Frege’s “Evening Star” and “Morning Star”; Lee 1997; Agha 2007b), the difference between the two names seems to (en) register a sociological distinction between two groups of users and/or two activities of naming. But do the two names in fact designate the same entity? The next section shows that a single name – Navajo – can denote multiple things: a sports utility vehicle, clothing, footwear, household products, even a brand of underwear sold in a store called Anthropologie. When used as a brand name, the word “Navajo” is itself a form of property and is protected under U.S. trademark law. But when the same term is used as the proper name of a tribal group or language, even by members of the group so named, it is outside the market – free, unregulated, but also unprotected.

North American Languages and Peoples

217

The Property in Names A tribal name change from Navajo to Diné, had it passed as a Navajo National Council resolution in 1993, would have entailed various changes (to stationery, signage, etc.), but would have required “no approval from either the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Indian Health Service” (“Navahos Weigh Return to Old Name” 1993). Tribal names as such cannot be registered – by tribal entities, or by anybody else – as trademarks, for the simple reason that the Lanham Act (15 USC § 1052 (1994)) prohibits the registration of any trademark that “(b) Consists of or comprises the flag or coat of arms or other insignia of the United States, or of any State or municipality, or of any foreign nation, or any simulation thereof.” Even though recognized tribes are neither foreign nations, States, nor municipalities – having instead a unique status as domestic dependent nations under the protection of the United States (EO 13084; 25 USC Section 71) – the passage in section 2(b) of the Lanham Act applies, a fact which opens the complexities of “sovereignty” to analytic view.12 If no one, not even the members of the tribe itself, can obtain protection for a tribal name as a form of intellectual property through the trademark registration process, it turns out that literally anyone, including the tribe itself, can register the tribal name as a trademark, provided that it functions as the brand name for a set of products and/or services offered in the marketplace.13 Since the 1990s many tribes have availed themselves of the normal trademark registration process to secure the names and associated emblems of their tribally owned business enterprises, which include, but are by no means limited to, casinos. In February 2012, for example, the Navajo Nation filed suit14 in federal court in New Mexico against Urban Outfitters Inc. and its affiliates Anthropologie and Free People – a development deemed significant enough by the intellectual property law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP to merit a special advisory to clients under the heading “Caution: Tribal Names Not a Free-For-All” (Green et al. 2012): In its Complaint, the Navajo Nation alleges that Urban Outfitters and its affiliates used, without the permission of the Navajo Nation, the terms “Navajo” and “Navaho” in connection with the sale of clothing, jewelry, footwear, handbags and other items. Some such items allegedly “evoke the Navajo Indian Tribe’s tribal patterns, including geometric prints and designs fashioned to mimic and resemble Navajo Indian and Tribal patterns, prints, and designs.” Other items, such as the defendants’ alleged use of “Navajo” on underwear and liquor flasks, are described as “derogatory and scandalous.” (Green et al. 2012)

The law firm commends the Navajo for “prioritiz[ing] the protection of its identity and intellectual property by pursuing [trademark] registrations,” noting that

218

Language and Materiality

Table 11.5 Selected Tribal Casino Names in Arizona and New Mexico Casino NameTM

Tribal Owner/Operator

Apache Gold Hotel Casino Bucky’s Casino Casino Arizona at McKellips Salt River Spirit Mountain Casino Buffalo Thunder Casino and Resort Cities of Gold Sports Bar Palace West Casino Sandia Casino Oh-Key Casino

San Carlos Apache Yavapai Maricopa Mojave Pojoaque Pueblo Pojoaque Pueblo Isleta Pueblo Sandia Pueblo Ohkey Owinge (formerly San Juan Pueblo)

“the Navajo Nation has registered more than 80 trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), including approximately 10 registrations of the mark ‘Navajo’ for clothing, footwear, other household products, and online retail sales” (Green et al. 2012).15 It is important to note that the names chosen by tribal entities for their business enterprises and products – names that, unlike the names of the tribal entities themselves, are registerable with the USPTO as trademarks – tend not to involve Native-language terms that might be difficult for nonspeakers to pronounce or that require special orthographic treatment (e.g., using diacritics or special characters). Just as FoxwoodsTM offers little challenge to Anglophone outsiders (less, certainly, than the tribal name Mashantucket Pequot), other tribes have followed the same pattern, as an assessment of the names of the several hundred tribally owned casinos in the United States shows. A small sample, shown in Table 11.5, will suffice as illustration of the general pattern. While there are allusions to things “Indian” in many of these casino names (Spirit Mountain, Buffalo Thunder), the allusions are a world away, one might say, from those invoked in and by the heavily nativized neotraditionalist names surveyed earlier. It is, of course, not surprising that in registering trademarks for products and services offered to a majority-Anglo marketplace, tribes (like their competitors) strive for recognizable, familiar, and easy-to-remember names – but the sociological implications of the contrast are telling. In contrast to the politics of tribal (and language) naming, much of which is community-internal and out of public view, the process of naming casinos and other business enterprises is decidedly and purposefully quite open to wider discourse communities, even in “fiercely private” Pueblo Indian communities. In 2005, Nambé Pueblo put out a public call (including in the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper) for help in naming a planned $30 million, 50,000-square-foot

North American Languages and Peoples

219

“casino and family oriented theme park” just down the road from Pojoaque’s Cities of Gold Casino. This attempt at “crowdsourcing” was shaped by the enthusiasms of the pueblo’s governor, Tom Talache: The governor welcomes suggestions from the public for the name of the casino, which he wants to call the Stargate Casino. Talache, who is a fan of the Star Trek television show and movies, is planning an entertainment park for children that would include spaceand extraterrestrial-themed programs to teach youngsters about life on other planets and traveling into space, he said. The circular-shaped casino – which is also related to round forms in the Indian world – will symbolize that vision, Talache said. At a recent meeting at the pueblo, tribal members suggested several names for the casino including: Galaxy, Northern Stargate, Northstar Casino, Space Flyer, Apollo and Enteri Nebula. “It’s exciting to see all the ideas that are coming from our members and leaders,” Talache said. A children’s entertainment center, which would be a separate building, would include miniature golf, bumper cars, a water park and an “edutainment” center that might attract NASA as a partner. (Stone 2005)

Readers of the Santa Fe New Mexican were given the telephone number of Nambé Pueblo’s administration office. It is striking to observe such openness in such famously “closed” communities (Pitt-Rivers 1957). In the example from Nambé Pueblo, the names are part of a lexical register – and an imagined cosmos – associated with sci-fi lovers and Star Trek fans. Here we are in the realm of what Michael Warner calls publics and counterpublics, forms of sociability that “commence with the moment of attention, must continually predicate renewed attention, and cease to exist when attention is no longer predicated,” where the “threshold of belonging is an active uptake” and “selfactivity” rather than “timeless belonging” (Warner 2002: 61–62). Rather than a transition from a regime of “pride” to one of “profit” (Duchêne and Heller 2012), what we observe here is perhaps a regime in which the one can be converted into the other.

Conclusion: The Properties of Names By focusing on contemporary political-economic systems that link indigenous and other local communities with global circulations of value, studying the politics of (re)naming can illuminate important aspects of the relationship between language and materiality. By now it has become clear that the old (or preexisting) name and the new (or neotraditionalist) name are in no very useful or interesting way semantically or even denotationally equivalent. The preexisting name and the new (old) name, then, enter into a dialectical relationship; they are mutually constitutive – not in spite of but because of their fundamental incommensurability at both the plane of denotation and of indexicality. In any single instance, the use of one name

220

Language and Materiality

inevitably points to (the nonuse of) the other name. But these are performative effects that are emergent in, and achievable only through, discourse practices. The rechristening of American Indian languages and groups establishes new speech chains (Agha 2007a) that exist alongside and are intertwined with those associated with the preexisting names. The neotraditionalist designations do not so much replace the preexisting names as supplement them, opening new possibilities for voicing like those glimpsed earlier in Wesley Leonard’s essay. The use of a neotraditionalist endonym unavoidably gestures toward the preexisting (perhaps exonymic) name – the name one has chosen not to use – even as it positions the user in a speech chain composed of the people who use the new name (perhaps “us”). This doubling of names creates the semiotic conditions under which both names, the neotraditionalist (stipulatively, if not actually, “older”) name and the preexisting (often out-group) name, can become citations (Derrida 1988). As Nakassis points out, to know something “as a citation (or perhaps, more precisely, an allusion), however, requires a familiarity with an interdiscursive chain that leads us back to, or projects, some original enunciation that took place in another place and time” (Nakassis 2012: 625). Such “familiarity” is a fact about users and cannot be recovered from “the citation”s form,” but rather “through the discursive acts that are brought to bear on interpreting it” (ibid.). The new (old) names recently adopted in Native communities are not brand names, but they are connected to trademarks (e.g., casino names and, in the Pueblo Southwest, to saints’ names), and they share in the semiotic logic of branding, insofar as any use of them will be unavoidably citational and unavoidably performative. As Nakassis notes, this performative citationality “is based not on the simple iterability of a type or the distinctivness of the tokens of that type. Rather, it is a function of the reflexive figuration of that very tension” (Nakassis 2012: 635; emphasis in original). Returning to the two dimensions of language materiality identified at the beginning of this chapter – roughly, the inscriptional (graphemic) and the sonic (phonetic) – it is now possible to make some synthesizing observations. First, one observes that in their graphemic aspect, the neotraditional names often look unusual or “marked” with respect to conventional spellings of Anglophone words. The neotraditional names display a number of features in common: unconventional and noncanonical sequences of ordinary alphabetic symbols (e.g., words apparently devoid of vowels, “impossible” spellings, etc.); use of nonalphabetic diacritic marks (e.g., accent marks, underlining) supplementing alphabetic symbols; apparent word-internal concatenation of alphabetic symbols with nonalphabetic ones, including (Arabic) numerals, and erstwhile “punctuation marks” (see the earlier discussion of Ts’il?os). Neotraditional naming practices also pose problems for understanding these new ethnolinguistic and ethnocultural designations as proper names: are

North American Languages and Peoples

221

they foreign words? Despite being legally unprotected, neotraditional tribal and language names as graphemic entities share many of the features just mentioned with brand names: noncanonical sequences of alphabetic symbols (cf. CompaqTM , XeroxTM ); diacritical marks (cf. HermêsTM ); and admixtures of alphabetical and nonalphabetical symbols (cf. 4chanTM ; the 1995 movie Se7en). In the context of the contemporary politics of indigeneity such renaming practices almost seem to mount an implicit critique of the alphabet itself and of canonical (Anglophone) spelling, pointing out the limitations of the received system for representing Native words in writing and at the same time manifesting an “alien” presence within the alphabet, one that might have been there all along (see also Dickinson on writing, this volume). The effects are not unlike those observed in “foreignizing” modes of translation (Venuti 1998). Finally, on the other dimension of materiality – the materiality of sound and the ethics of “voice” – the neotraditional names pose additional challenges: they are often difficult to pronounce. As inscriptions, they resist “normal” (schooled) strategies for reanimating text artifacts via reading aloud (graphemeto-phoneme transduction). It is also worth pointing out that at least some of the neotraditional names existed as orthographic creations before they could exist as audible, spoken words (Derrida 1998 [1967]). Most important of all, the new names – notwithstanding any claims about them – do not replace the old names, but instead enter into a dialogic relationship with them. To put it more specifically, in the cases discussed here, the old names and the new (“older”) names are in a citational relationship with each other. Tribal names and language names (as opposed to the brand names of resorts and casinos, household products, or camping equipment) are free, unregulated, but also legally unprotected. Perhaps the alphabetic and phonetic challenges that neotraditionalist names pose to Anglophone readers and speakers are meant in part to express through material means (e.g., special spellings, fonts, diacritics, and the Native-language sounds they represent) a relationship of care, and perhaps a degree of protectionism, between emergent Indigenous publics and their languages, in the absence of the legal protections that are afforded to brand names and other proprietary expressions. Examining the politics of naming illuminates a seeming paradox that lies at the heart of the contemporary politics of language endangerment and revitalization: On one hand, community-based efforts to reclaim ancestral languages are seen as acting against the “community-external” forces that threaten the future of ancestral languages; at the same time, these efforts connect local communities with global circuits of communication in a framework of aspirations to the ownership and preservation of the forms of value that index indigeneity, tradition, cultural difference. They provide platforms for the reflexive figuration, in

222

Language and Materiality

and through discursive practice, of the tension between locality and globality, now as relativized centers of value in late capitalism.

N OT E S 1 See, e.g., Agha (2007a, b); Duchêne and Heller (2012); Hull (2003); Irvine (1989); Keane (2003); Manning (2010); Moore (2003); Nakassis (2012); Shankar and Cavanaugh (2012), and Silverstein (1984). 2 I am indebted to Paul Kroeber (pers. comm., November 5, 2012) for this formulation. 3 See the discussion at www.uaf.edu/anlc/resources/inuit-eskimo/. 4 The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (Pub.L. 100–497, 25 U.S.C. § 2701 et seq.), which enabled the emergence of the casino economy (see, e.g., Cattelino 2008), was signed into law in 1988; Indian Arts & Crafts Act (25 USC § 305–309; Pub. L. 101– 644), the Native American Languages Act (NALA) (Pub. L. 101–477), the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (Pub. L. 101–601, 25 U.S.C. § 3001 et seq.), and the U.S. National Park Service’s Bulletin 38, Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties, all date to 1990. 5 See www.nuuchahnulth.org/tribal-council/welcome.html. 6 See www.umista.ca/kwakwakawakw/index.php. 7 I am indebted to Paul Kroeber (pers. comm., November 5, 2012) for information and guidance regarding the Salishan cases. 8 See www.uslces.org/other_spellings.htm. 9 Witherspoon (1977: 119) presents an ethno-taxonomy with diné denoting “(all) humans” at the top, subdivided into diyin dineʔe denoting supernaturals and nihookaa dineʔe denoting “earth surface people”; the latter is subdivided into diné “Navajo people” and anaʔi “foreigners.” 10 After diligent searching online I was able to find a Facebook page but not a website for Kewa Pueblo (or Santo Domingo Pueblo). 11 Some usages are structurally ambiguous: the noun phrase “Miami language efforts,” for example, could be interpreted as “language efforts undertaken by the Miami people” (ethnonym) or as “efforts directed to the Miami language” (glossonym). In cases like these I chose the latter interpretation, which has the effect of inflating the count of glossonymic uses of “Miami.” 12 There is a large literature here. See, e.g., Audet (2001); Bernholz et al. (2009) Coombe (1993); Dougherty (1998); Guest (1995); Kelley (2007); Kremens (2004); Lury (1999); Nason (2001); and Newton (1995), among others. 13 “In 1970 the Chrysler Corporation’s Jeep/Eagle Division applied for and received federal trademark registration for its sports utility vehicle, the Jeep ‘Cherokee.’ In 1990 the Mazda Corporation received federal trademark registration for its sports utility vehicle, the ‘Navajo’” (Guest 1995: 126). Guest further reports that according to the 1993 edition of Brands and Their Companies (Stetler 1993), 35 different products had been registered under the trademark Apache, 28 under Cherokee, 14 under Navaho or Navajo, and 3 under Zuni – the products including “camping trailers, sailboats, motorcycles, auto accessories, bicycles, hunting accessories, jewelry, clothing, footwear, food products, [and] wall coverings” (Guest 1995: 126). By 1998, there were 94 registered trademarks using Cherokee, 35 using Navajo, and 208 using Sioux (Dougherty 1998: 336n87; cf Newton 1995: 1007).

North American Languages and Peoples

223

14 Navajo Nation v. Urban Outfitters, Inc., et al., U.S. Court for Dist. of New Mexico, Case No. 12-cv-00195 (filed Feb. 28, 2012). 15 “The Navajo Nation has also repeatedly expanded the authorized use of its trademarks by licensing to others the right to use ‘Navajo.’ Trademark license agreements – if drafted and performed correctly – enhance rather than dilute the licensor’s trademark rights and can generate substantial revenue through royalties” (Green et al. 2012). REFERENCES Agha, Asif. 2007a. “The Object Called “Language” and the Subject of Linguistics.” Journal of English Linguistics 35(3): 217–235. 2007b. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Audet, M. 2001. “Native American Tribal Names as Monikers and Logos: Will these Registrations Withstand Cancellation under Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act after Harjo v. Pro Football, Inc. (Redskins)?” AIPLA Quarterly Journal 29: 129–180 Bakhtin, M. M. 1981 [1934–1935]. “Discourse in the Novel.” In M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Basso, Keith H. 1988. “Speaking with Names.” Cultural Anthropology 3(2): 99–130. Bernholz, Charles D., Linda G. Novotny, and Ana L. Gomez. 2009. American Indians and the United States Patent and Trademark Office: The Native American Tribal Insignia Database. Faculty Publications, University of Nebraska – Lincoln Libraries, Paper 177. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/177 Cattelino, Jessica. 2008. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Constable, Anne. 2010. “Pueblo Returns to Traditional Name. Santo Domingo quietly becomes ‘Kewa’; tribe alters seal, signs and letterhead.” Santa Fe New Mexican, March 9. Coombe, Rosemary. 1993. “The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity: Native Claims in the Cultural Appropriation Controversy.” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 6: 249–285. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited, Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1998 [1967]. “The Violence of the Letter, from Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau.” In J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 101–140. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dickinson, Q. T. 2000. Official Insignia of Native American tribes; Report Pursuant to PL 105–330. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Dinwoodie, David. 1998. “Authorizing Voices: Going Public in an Indigenous Language.” Cultural Anthropology 13(2): 193–223. 2002. Reserve Memories: The Power of the Past in a Chilcotin Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Dougherty, Terence. 1998. “Group Rights to Cultural Survival: Intellectual Property Rights in Native American Cultural Symbols.” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 29: 355–400. Duchêne, A. and M. Heller, eds. 2012. Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit. New York: Routledge. Green, Blaine, Robert Burlingame, and Jeffrey Jacobi. 2012. “Caution: Tribal Names Not a Free-for-All.” Advisory. Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, March 30.

224

Language and Materiality

Guest, Richard A. 1995. “Intellectual Property Rights and Native American Tribes.” American Indian Law Review 20(1): 111–139. Hale, Ken, Michael Krauss, Lucille J. Watahomigie, Akira Y. Yamamoto, Colette Craig, LaVerne Masayesva Jeanne, and Nora C. England. 1992. “Endangered Languages.” Language 68(1): 1–42. Hull, Matthew. 2003. “The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy.” Language & Communication 23: 287–314. Hymes, Dell. 1968. “Linguistic Problems in Defining the Concept of ‘Tribe.’” In Essays on the Problem of Tribe, edited by J. Helm, 23–48. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Irvine, Judith. 1989. “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy.” American Ethnologist 16(2): 248–267. Kanamine, Linda. 1993. “Navajo Council is Considering a Name Change.” USA Today, December 15. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language & Communication 23: 409–425. Kelley, J. K. 2007. “Owning the Sun: Can Native Culture Be Protected through Intellectual Property Law?” Journal of High Technology Law 7: 180–202. Kremens, N. 2004. “Speaking with a Forked Tongue in the Global Dispute on Traditional Knowledge and Genetic Resources: Is US Intellectual Property Law and Policy Really Aimed at Meaningful Protection? for Native American cultures?” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal 15: 1–146. Kripke, Saul. 1972. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuipers, Aert H. 1974. The Shuswap Language. The Hague: Mouton. Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking Heads. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leonard, Wesley Y. 2011. “Challenging ‘extinction’ through Modern Miami Language Practices.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35(2): 135–159. Lockridge, Kay. 2010. “Out of Time: Pueblo Traditions Hold Strong in Modern Day.” Santa Fe New Mexican, May 16, 2010. Lury, A. A. 1999. “Official Insignia, Culture, and Native Americans: An Analysis of Whether Current United States Trademark Law Should be Changed to Prevent the Registration of Official Tribal Insignia.” Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property Law 1: 137–157. Manning, Paul. 2010. “The Semiotics of Brand.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 33–49. McIlwraith, T. F. 1992 [1948]. The Bella Coola Indians. 2 vols. New Introduction by John Barker. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McKosato, Harlan. 2005. “Commentary: Native Nations Should Retake Native Names.” Santa Fe New Mexican, October 23. Moore, Robert. 2003. “From Genericide to Viral Marketing: ‘On Brand.’” Language & Communication 23(3/4): 331–359. 2012. ‘“Taking up speech’ in an Endangered Language: Bilingual Discourse in a Heritage Language Classroom.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 27(2): 57–78. Moore, Robert, Sari Pietikäinen, and Jan Blommaert. 2011. “Counting the Losses: Numbers as the Language of Language Endangerment.” Studies in Sociolinguistics doi: 0.1558/sols.v4i1.1.

North American Languages and Peoples

225

Muzellec, Laurent. 2006. “What is in a Name Change? Re-Joycing Corporate Names to Create Corporate Brands.” Corporate Reputation Review 8(4): 305–321. Nakassis, Constantine V. 2012. “Brand, Citationality, Performativity.” American Anthropologist 114(4): 624–638. Nason, James. 2001. “Traditional Property and Modern Laws: The Need for Native American Community Intellectual Property Rights Legislation.” Stanford Law & Policy Review 12(2): 255–266. “Navajos Weigh Return to Old Name; Dine. 1993. New York Times, December 17. Newton, Nell Jessup. 1995. “Memory and misrepresentation: Representing Crazy Horse.” Connecticut Law Review 27: 1003–1036. Norrell, Brenda. 1994. “Navajo Oppose Name Change.” Indian Country Today, January 12. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1957. “The Closed Community and its Friends.” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 16: 5–15. Sapir, Edward. 1949 [1933]. “The Psychological Reality of Phonemes.” In Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, edited by D. Mandelbaum, 46–60. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1996 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Searle, John R. 1971. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shankar, Shalini, and Jillian R. Cavanaugh. 2012. “Language and Materiality in Global Capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 355–369. Silverstein, Michael. 1984. “The ‘Value’ of Objectual Language.” www.scribd.com/ document/36490815/Silverstein-The-Value-of-Objectual-Language. 1998. “Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 401–426. Silverstein, M. and G. Urban. 1996. “The Natural History of Discourse.” In Natural Histories of Discourse, edited by M. Silverstein and G. Urban, 1–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmons, Marc. 2007. “Trail Dust: Name Changes Present Challenges.” Santa Fe New Mexican, October 13. Stetler, Susan. 1993. Brands and Their Companies. Gale Cengage. Stone, Marissa. 2005. “Indian Gang: Nambé Pueblo Seeks Help Naming Futuristic Casino.” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 24. Suttles, Wayne. 1987. Coast Salish Essays. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Urla, Jacqueline. 2012. Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation, and Cultural Activism. New York: Wiley. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethic of Difference. London: Routledge. Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14(1): 49–90. Witherspoon, Gary. 1977. Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

12

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia Paul Manning

In the country of Georgia, the simplest cultural categorization of drinks has to do with which drinks one must drain to a toast and those that can be drunk without saying any words at all, but are usually sipped sociably in casual conversation. In the country Georgia, ritual drinks – drinks that are aligned with a specific linguistic genre, the toast – are categorized ecologically as well as culturally: mountain regions (mta) can produce only beer or vodka locally, and one of these is the ritual drink; in the plains (bari), which are celebrated lands of wine production, wine generally takes pride of place, and these other drinks are relegated to subsidiary positions. Ecology in this sense draws our attention to (natural material) ecological affordances or semiotic potentials that LéviStrauss (1973) discusses in his classic Structuralism and Ecology. However, ritual drinks seldom travel alone, there are often other ritual or nonritual drinks at the same table, and at other times the same drink might serve different functions or preclude others: regional toasting drinks such as vodka, beer, and wine are rivalrous for the role of ritual toasting drink, particularly if they wind up on the same table; wine and beer can express antithetical sentiments in a toast; and alcoholic drinks invade spaces dedicated to nonalcoholic beverages. In addition, there are new nonritual drinks: Georgian quality aged wines that are drunk for the taste and never for the toast and Western “mixed” drinks that preclude toasting and are harbingers of new ways of drinking. At each individual table, a microecology of drinks produces the potential site of rivalry between drinks – a contestation of these cultural and ecological categorizations where we move from a static semiological code or system to a metaphoric semiotic ecology, driven in part by ecological networks of indexical and iconic figurations that link language to nonlanguage, with different consequences for the relations of drink to talk. While a semiotic system or code remains a workable metaphor when system of oppositions have stabilized with respect to meaning and material conditions, “structure,” and “ecology” (Lévi-Strauss 1973), so as to become a Latourian “black box,” semiotic ecology might be a better metaphor for a heterogeneous semiotic assemblage of language and materiality that is emergent (see Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume), because it implies a 226

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

227

system in which things are adapting, changing, falling apart, or being assembled on the fly. These emergent or collapsing semiotic systems – those that seem to act more like semiotic ecologies and contain rivalrous elements that seek historically to supplant one another – are the focus of this chapter. A Lévi-Straussian “structure” or “code” is in effect a Latourian “black box” where material signifiers largely assume the role of what Latour calls “intermediaries” – passive relays of semiosis – whereas in a metaphoric “semiotic ecology,” material signifiers “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour 2005:39; see Hull 2012: 253 and Gershon and Manning 2014: 551 on the utility of this distinction). This chapter uses ethnographic material from drinking practices in the country of Georgia to explore a series of such stable and emergent indexical and iconic semiotic pairings of language (linguistic acts) to various forms and acts in nonlinguistic domains that are conceived of as being (like language itself) both meaningful in their own right (“semiotic”) and potentially refractory to the meanings proposed by words (“material”), including drinks, embodied practices, and places that are constitutive of a kind of semiotic ecology. Such indexical (relations of contiguity) and iconic (relations of resemblance) pairings, which range across aspects of language and nonlanguage, including drinks, embodiment, and spaces, produce a series of what Rupert Stasch calls “ties of indexical and iconic figuration” that work “across the boundary zones of language and non-language” (Stasch 2014: 612–613). Following Stasch, I wish to suggest that tracing such conventionalized indexical and iconic figurations throughout different dimensions of the lived world can show us how “lifeworlds are composed of vast networks of pragmatic figuration across and within all different layers of people’s presence” (ibid.: 613). As I hope to show in the rest of this chapter, the sustained attention to such material semiotic figurations that connect language and nonlanguage gives us a means to describe “the vast sweep of ties of indexical and iconic figuration across different media and dimensions of a human world,” as Stasch (ibid.: 613) argues. Using examples from the articulation of drink and talk particularly in Georgia, I draw together these networks of material semiotic figuration that bind language to the many nonlinguistic dimensions of the world, as well as explore the refractory recalcitrance of materiality itself to semiosis, under the deliberately vague metaphor of “semiotic ecology.” As Shankar and Cavanaugh point out, (Chapter 1, this volume), one way to attend to “language materiality” is to inspect situations in which the “materiality of language” is foregrounded by being paired as a material form or act with other nonlinguistic material forms or acts within a local semiotic ecology (“language and materiality”).

228

Language and Materiality

Generally, when I consider materiality in relation to semiosis, I am referring to those aspects (qualia, qualisigns) of the material sign vehicle (the thing) that are semiotic affordances for semiosis (Manning 2012a:11–14) – that is, that either constrain or enable certain semiotic potentials – or to those properties of the thing that have not (yet) been enrolled in the aspect of semiosis I am interested in, and remain, with respect to the semiotic event in question, “mere materiality” (for qualia and qualisigns, see Chumley 2013; Chumley and Harkness 2013; Harkness 2013, 2015). Here I am actually following Peirce’s own usage of the term materiality: “Since a sign is not identical with the thing signified, but differs from the latter in some respects, it must plainly have some characters which belong to it in itself, and have nothing to do with its representative function. These I call the material qualities of the sign” (Peirce 1868, emphasis in original). Thus, the sign’s materiality not only “limits” or “hems in” semiotic possibility but also serves as a term of excess, a sign of openended possibility itself (Nakassis 2013: 402). The sense of materiality, as a kind of exteriority of the sign’s potential to that actually involved in any particular semiotic event, produces a sense of materiality as an obdurate or recalcitrant otherwise to semiosis: Taken together, the otherwise of materiality is also the object-sign’s Secondness, its resistance to being pinned down totally and forever, how it resists being in any one agent’s control, exceeding the interactions in which it is deployed by spilling into others. This recalcitrance is, in certain respects, retroactive, imputed to the token object when it ends up being used otherwise and elsewhere. (Nakassis 2013: 402)

In this chapter, I collect together all these perspectives on the relation of semiosis to materiality using the metaphor of a semiotic ecology. While there are many potential metaphors or terms for the material messiness I wish to explore, including networks, collectives, entanglements, and assemblages, I want to use the term “ecology” for several reasons. First, there is a literal ecological dimension to the distributions of drink that acts as one of the affordances for its semiotic potential: the climate opposition between mountains and plains ecosystems and climates in Georgia, as in the Mediterranean region (in an observation as old as the Greek geographer Strabo [e.g., Geography 3.7]), is the same as the opposition between areas of beer (butter) and wine (oil) production. There is a simple ecological determinism (what I call “Strabo’s Law”) at work, which produces a literal ecology of drink. Similarly, the term “ecology” was famously used by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1973) in his Structuralism and Ecology to denote a nonhuman naturally given material world that is opposed to the human, arbitrary world of cultural meaning (code); an autonomous nature also provides the world of culture with the affordances for thought and cultural symbolism. Lévi-Strauss proposed a model in which ecology (nature) proposes and

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

229

culture disposes; that is, a nonhuman ecology produces a huge variety of potential material signifiers, from which humans select some and organize them into an arbitrary cultural or semiotic system: each culture “chooses specific animals, plants, minerals, celestial bodies and natural phenomena to endow them with significance” (ibid.: 9): Some distinctive features of the ecology are selected, and it would be impossible to state in advance which ones they will be and to what use they will be put. Furthermore, so great is the wealth and diversity of the raw material provided by the environment that only a few of the innumerable possible elements can be retained by the system, so there is no doubt that a considerable number of other systems could exist, none of which is predestined to be chosen by all societies and all civilizations. (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 10)

This is, of course, a classic statement of the relation of meaning to materiality, and of culture to nature, in structuralism: materiality (explicitly aligned with a world of objects and phenomena produced by a single nonhuman nature) affords an excess of material signifiers to which arbitrary meanings (explicitly aligned with a plurality of human cultures) are attached. The relationship between ecology and system is an external one between two entirely separate determinisms – nonhuman nature (materiality) and human culture (significance) – each working by its own rules. My rhetorical intent here, then, is to offer a trope on the term “ecology,” both with a sideward glance to its particular use by Lévi-Strauss to posit the material world as a kind of semiotic raw material and explore the literal ecological/material conditions of possibility of drink (“Strabo’s Law”) and also to explore the inherent metaphoric possibilities of the term “ecology” to imagine messy material semiotic systems. After all, the term in ordinary usage contains within it a sense of active, buzzing confusion; of living animate beings of various kinds and descriptions interacting, often rivalrously; and of a dynamic historical system that is constantly undergoing change; this system, unlike a Saussurean code or a Lévi-Straussian structure, is not innocent of material distinctions of quantity (e.g., a difference between a toast and a bottle of wine as semiotic sign tokens is that you can say as many toasts as you please but the material limit on saying them as toasts is how many bottles of wine you have to drink them to), and its elements are not as orderly as the crystalline lattice of a structure, nor yet as simply messy as an imbroglio, entanglement, or assemblage, but rather are in active rivalry with one another. Signifiers not only originate from within the material givens of an actual ecology, but we can imagine their interactions as signifiers using the metaphor of an ecology, imagining them as the little plants and animals of an ecosystem. Where structuralism gave us dematerialized signifiers drawn initially from the material world (“ecology”) but subsequently defined entirely by their places in a system

230

Language and Materiality

(“code”), these materialized signifiers are not only distinctive but also more or less numerous, rivalrous, or symbiotic with one another; competitive for ecological niches; hungry for meaning; adapting to new habitats; or about to go extinct. The “Pairing” of Drink and Talk The material semiotic basis of the categorization of drinks as “ritual” (drinks to be drunk at a ritual feasting event called a supra, ones that can, indeed must, accompany a toast) and “nonritual” (drinks that can be drunk at any number of different events, focused or unfocused, ones that have a much looser gearing of acts and genres of talking and drinking) is the indexical “pairing” of talking and drink, language and nonlanguage. The indexical relationship between talking and drinking is symmetric and reversible: some genres of language (toasting) produce a strong immediate entailment on drinking (wine), whereas some genres of drinking (beer) produce a more general context for talking (sociable conversation) or optional jocular “anti-toasts” whose performative meaning is the opposite of that proposed by the words. This humble observation leads to a series of interrelated observations about what Stasch calls the “figurational” relationship of different material semiotic forms or acts, including for my purposes acts of language (talking) to nonlanguage (drinking): By “figurational” I mean that a given form or act in human life is not self-contained, selfsame, or natural, but semiotic. The form or act is defined and supported by concepts, understandings, and other forms or acts in other layers of life, and it defines and supports them in turn. (Stasch 2014: 611)

One example of such a “figurational” relationship between language (itself material-semiotic as Shankar and Cavanaugh [Chapter 1, this volume] emphasize) and a nonlinguistic material semiotic “form or act,” then, would be these conventionalized indexical pairings where a classification of drinks is immediately a classification of genres of talk. Some pairings are stronger, others are looser, but we must treat both paired elements, language and nonlanguage, symmetrically (Stasch 2014: 615), both in terms of their semiotic and material dimensions. Following a certain kind of Austinian language-centered theory of performativity, speech acts like toasting could be described as an essentially linguistic act, involving, say, a central linguistic performative statement paired with a peripheral material “felicity condition” relegated to mere “context.” Georgians primarily perform toasts at a kind of ritual feast called a supra (literally “tablecloth,” indicating the space around which the ritual is convened). Supras are an ubiquitous aspect of Georgian traditional ritual expression; virtually every ritual event either consists of a supra or involves a supra in some

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

231

fashion (compare Karp 1980 on the virtual synonymy of “beer” and “ritual” among the Iteso). Participation in drinking and toasting a supra is obligatory for men, usually optional for women, and drinking a toast is considered to be a twofold expression of masculinity: the abilities to speak and drink artfully are brought into close alignment as masculine virtues (see for example Manning 2012a: 148–176; Walker and Manning 2013). Given this ritual context of feasting and drinking, it is perhaps not surprising that Georgians treat the speech act of toasting as a kind of “blessing” of the drink, so that drinking the “blessed” drink itself becomes the performative, quasi-eucharistic, act. The performativity of a toast depends on indexically paired and symmetric semiotic acts, where the word proposes, the drink disposes. It is precisely the indexical entailment between talk and drink that produces a symmetry between the two: talking and drinking become equal, though serial, semiotic partners of a single performative act; the fact that they are linked together indexically, performed by the same person, using the same mouth, at the token (sinsign) level makes them symmetric material acts. Toasts often draw attention to this linkage with an explicit reflexive metapragmatic formulation with deictic reference to the drink: “Friends, with this little glass, I want to say a toast . . . ” Indexical linkages are always between tokens (one toast, one drink, one person, one mouth) and thus can only happen at the material level (sinsign, parole), because the linkage itself depends on their shared material existence as particulars. But in toasting, such figurational pairings of language and nonlanguage involve not only indexical relations of contiguity but also iconic relations of mutual resemblance. These semiotic figurations of iconic resemblance involve “crossmodal iconism” (Harkness 2013: 13; see also Chumley and Harkness 2013), which depends on materially embodied qualia shared between those tokens that bridge the differing materialities of talk and drink: At the most basic level, qualitative experience is made up of what Peirce called qualia, the actual instantiations of quality that are inflected by and related to thought, materiality, sensory channels, etc. Qualia are lived. Whereas quality itself belongs to the realm of firstness, qualia as “facts of firstness” (Peirce 1998 [1903]b: 272) are more complex. They are instances, i.e. secondnesses, which can stand for quality in two ways: iconically (by seeming to exhibit some quality), and indexically (by suggesting a contiguity with some quality). (Harkness 2013:14)

Such cross-modal iconism is pervasive in Georgian toasting: the amount one drinks to a toast is both a conventional index and icon, a liquid measure, of the amount of sentiment felt by the speaker of the words of the toast. If one does not drink a glass to the bottom, the subject of the toast might pick up the half-full glass, hold it up, and exclaim ruefully: “Is this how much you esteem me?” In the toast, the two acts, drinking and speaking, are conventionally linked

232

Language and Materiality

Image 12.1 “Friends, with these different drinking vessels . . . ”

not only indexically but also by their mutual resemblance (iconicity). A guide to supra etiquette draws attention to this mutual quantitative resemblance of paired language and drink: “A Georgian toast should resemble a moderate sized drinking-bowl (piala) filled with good wine – neither with long words should you tire your listener, nor should you drink like a drunk, alone, without words” (Kinkladze 2000: 3). In Georgian toasting, this quantitative iconic relationship of drink to sentiment is figured in the bewildering qualitative elaboration and proliferation of drinking vessels with decorative shapes. Here, perhaps in some unwitting parody of the formulations of dialectical materialism, there is a cross-modal transition from quantity to quality, since differently shaped (ganskhavebuli [different]) drinking vessels, whatever their whimsical shape, always have a larger capacity, and are used for qualitatively “special” toasts. In the satirical cartoon shown in Image 12.1, the drunken man replaces the conventional toast invocation, “Friends, with this little glass,” gesturing drunkenly instead at “these different drinking vessels,” implying an immense amount of drink. Such a close

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

233

pairing (a figuration with both indexical and iconic dimensions) of genred acts of drinking and acts of speaking, so close they become symmetric parts of the same genre, is familiar from ethnographic examples elsewhere; for example Frake’s (1964) classic discussion of beer drinking among the Subanun, where “jar talk” progresses through a series of paired genres of speaking and drinking. In more informal genres of nonritualized sociable drinking in Georgia and elsewhere (typified by the English pub, the European café, or Karp’s (1980) equally classic discussion of beer drinking among the Iteso) we also find an indexical and iconic “pairing” of word and drink, drinking and talking, albeit looser (e.g., Mass Observation 1987 [1943]: 185–191; Laurier 2008; Manning 2012a). In these looser pairings, the drink moves from being central “topical” or “thematic” to talk to being backgrounded as a kind of “infrastructure” for talk (Manning 2012a: 15–17). In such cases “drinking serves as an alibi for conviviality” (Laurier 2008: 171), where “the movements and objects that accompany drinking become resources in talking together” (ibid.: 178). The amount of drink in a glass here can serve as an hourglass-like measure of sociable talking time left. The ethnographic collective Mass Observation, in the classic ethnographic study of the English pub, for example, attends assiduously to the various behaviors that accompany drinking, including talking, smoking, and spitting. Among these detailed observations of “things done while drinking” is the behavior of “swiggling,” moving a nearly empty beer glass in circles so that the beer eddies and swirls (Mass Observation 1987 [1943]: 185–186). It is not difficult to see in “swiggling,” in Depression-era Britain, a way of extending a limited resource or alibi for sociability – the last beer in a glass – precisely by not drinking it. In a sociable drinking and talking encounter, as Laurier shows, the drink is a resource or affordance that not only eases the conversation along but also the management of the last sips of a glass can be a resource to artfully extend a conversation or to bring the conversation to a close. Talking, Drinking, and Embodiment However, the shared materiality of talking and drinking places strong limits on how closely calibrated this semiotic pairing can be. The pairing of drinking and talking is always asymptotic on the material plane because they must happen in the same mouth: one can talk and then drink, or drink and then talk, but it is physically impossible to do both at the same time. As Eric Laurier puts it, “drinking, be it of beer or coffee or milk, keeps our mouths occupied during all manner of sociable occasions where those mouths are also and otherwise engaged in talking” (Laurier 2008: 171). The fact that one cannot drink and talk at the same time reminds us that all semiotic events, whether talking or drinking, are at the same time material happenings and that, in this case, a mouth and throat can be used to drink or talk at any given moment, but not both.

234

Language and Materiality

The materiality of these semiotic events also reminds us that this binary pairing of drink and talk occurs in indexical relation to a third entity, a body, which can speak and can drink, but not at the same time. Just as the most commonly used “different” drinking vessel, the horn, iconically foregrounds the special importance of a toast by its semiotically marked “different” form, its material form also compels drinking a greater quantity of drink because it both holds more wine and lacks a base, so that it cannot be set down until it has been emptied. The compulsive, forceful, even violent, quality (Peircean secondness) of the horn is underlined by the metapragmatic terminology for a toast with a horn: “forcing wine” (ghvinis dadzaleba). Drinking more also entails an indexical effect on the human body at the physiological level: drunkenness. But the very unequal drinking capacities of the bodies and the measure of drinks brought together at a single table can also become the subject of commentaries. In the cartoon in Image 12.2, titled “Logic,” the much larger man prevails upon the smaller man to drink a toast from a large drinking horn: “Drink from this horn, it will do you good!” The smaller man reacts with shock and what appears to be sound logic: “I can’t! Even animals have a sense of proportion!” To which the larger man responds with the unassailable logic of the supra: “Then we must drink more, so we can be distinguished from animals!” In general, the quantitative forceful encounter between drinker and drink is elaborated as a contest or trial of masculine honor in which the man measures himself against the drink: “The drinking-vessel is a cow’s horn, of considerable length, and the point of honor is to drain it at a draught” (Sheil 1856). The iconic figuration of drinker and drink is sometimes elaborated by treating the body as being another drinking vessel into which the wine is decanted; thus the effortless masculine “artistry” of drinking lies in “not drinking, but pouring the precious liquid from one vessel into another” (Iskander 1983: 184).1 At the proximal level of figuration, the act of toasting produces a kind of Georgian “poetics of manhood” (Herzfeld 1985) in which a man produces an agonistic image of masculinity expressed both in word and deed, pitting himself against the material measure of masculinity (drink), implicitly vying with the other men at the table as speaker and drinker, and measuring himself in units of paired words and drink. But if drinking individual toasts measures masculinity locally at the supra, the supra ritual enters into a complex field of figurations of a semiotic ecology that structures the landscape with a “heterotopia” of drinking, including both other spaces to have a supra and ways to drink other than the supra. Of Other Spaces (to Drink): Gardens, Graves, and Tables Georgians call their ritual form of drinking after one of its material components: the supra. As mentioned earlier, this word is sometimes translated as “table,”

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

235

Image 12.2 “Logic”

but it actually originally refers to the napkin or tablecloth from which the ritual takes its name.2 Any supra, and any supra toast, involves three elements – language, drink, and the human who is both speaker and drinker – that are brought together at the supra (again, cloth or tablecloth) from which the ritual takes its name. Drinkers “sit” at a supra: to bring these things together, there must be a place to sit (a supra), but sometimes the tablecloth can be spread over a table with chairs, and sometimes it can be a simple cloth to be spread on the ground. This is not the case with all alcohols: informal sociable drinks such as beer, accompanied by the plebeian masculine toasting drink, vodka, can find

236

Language and Materiality

their occasion anywhere: seated on a curb or park bench or standing next to a table, including the mysterious tables set up by anonymous drinkers, addressed to drinkers in general, that can be found in otherwise vacant lots. The importance of sitting while drinking wine and toasting cannot be overemphasized: one European drinking ritual that Georgian intellectuals have either embraced as a revolutionary harbinger of Euro-modernity or as an unpleasantness that must be quietly endured is the reception (alapurshet’i), where there is no table and no food beyond some cheese and crackers (in contrast to the elaborate spread of a real supra), and where wine must be consumed standing, without toasting. I have seldom seen a group of Georgian men more obviously uncomfortable than when confronted with the prospect of drinking wine in this way: the few receptions I have attended have often ended with a table being brought in, a toastmaster appointed, and a supra begun (Manning 2012a). In paying careful attention to the affordances – planned and unplanned – of the built environment for different forms of convivial drinking, the Georgians are certainly not alone. One of the most important features of Mass Observation’s report, The Pub and the People, was the keen attention paid to seenbut-unnoticed material features of the built environment of the pub as a kind of “architecture of sociability” (Ellis 2008: 161). The ecology of the pub displays a mysterious material division “into three architectural realms, of different sizes, and of different types” (Mass Observation 1987 [1943]: 96–97), each differentiated by permitting specific kinds of drinkers based on gender, as well as the complex set of iconic figurations of “feminine” domestic “respectability” of the “parlour” (versus the “masculine” egalitarian “roughness” of the “vault”) involving the indexical covariation of tables and chairs, the presence or absence of aspidistra plants, female drinkers, dry spittoons, “no random saliva,” men wearing ties, and expensive beer in the former and the opposite properties in the latter. This cross-modal iconism links together a series of objects and acts emblematic of feminine respectability (tables and chairs, aspidistra plants, female drinkers, men wearing ties, and the general absence of saliva either in the spittoon or on the floor) in the “parlour” and opposes them to the opposite space of the vaults. Certain of these objects, specifically the aspidistra plant – a household plant popular for its abilities to survive and even prosper in conditions of low sunlight and mephitic indoor atmospheres produced by oil lamps and coal gas heating, which was almost emblematic of feminine middle-class domestic spaces – in turn link the “parlour” to feminine domestic spaces of the home, and the relative elaboration of these qualia of respectability (which differentiate rooms within a single pub) recursively differentiate lower-end “rough” pubs from high-end “respectable” pubs (ibid.: 100–107). Similarly, one can learn something about the ecology of Georgian drinking by paying sustained attention to the affordances of the built environment for

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

237

sitting-while-drinking, both private and public. In fact, it is safe to say that much of the architecture and material culture of Georgian households, especially under late socialism and particularly in villages, were specifically designed as architectures of sociability and hospitality for the supra. One ethnographer recalls times when, in the 1960s, a period of relative prosperity in Soviet culture, the material elaboration of the supra began to take on an immoderate form in all its dimensions, as traditional forms of hospitality came to be materially elaborated in competitive status displays to index emergent differences of household wealth, so that as men pitted their masculinity against one another overtly in toasting, it fell to the women of the household to covertly oversee competitive displays of hospitality – the covert feminine infrastructure of the overt display of masculine conviviality – largely in the form of food and presentation (Manning 2012a: 153–159, 170–173), which status competition it was the task of Soviet ethnographers to censure: In every such family we saw the tables, chairs, dishes and entire collections of drinking vessels in many shapes and sizes necessary for a big supra. This exaggerated display of hospitality, which took the form of a meaningless competition, was censured by me and my colleagues, we appealed to the population for moderation. We also censured the practice of forcing drinking, the throwing of supras for purposes of self-interest, the immoderate drinking and eating, using tradition as a cover for drunkenness, etc. (Pruidze 2001: 12)

Such affordances of sociability and hospitality extend to the living and the dead alike. The first thing one notices when approaching a suburban or rural Georgian Orthodox graveyard are the tables. There are tables everywhere, sometimes with little benches and seats attached. Sometimes a little table, enough for one or two people, is built into the grave enclosure; sometimes a larger table is built nearby, in the space between graves; sometimes several grave sites will share tables between them. The size of the tables, their quality, indexes a number of things, such as wealth, but also, the number of people who might be expected to use them. Given all the tables under trees, one might easily mistake a Georgian graveyard for a picnic site. The mistake would not be so far off. The tables are not metaphoric; they are practical. They are real tables intended to be used. Georgian rituals involve a large number of events relating to remembering the dead, and each of these rituals involves drinking toasts to the dead. The omnipresence of this ritual, the supra, in Georgian life is nowhere better displayed than the way it is built into the architecture of Georgian graveyards. The Georgian graveyard expresses a certain kind of architecture of sociability, in this case, the sociability between the living and the dead. These graveyard tables seem to be a relatively recent postsocialist phenomenon, indexing in their material elaboration all the political-economic

238

Language and Materiality

Image 12.3 Mafia grave table

changes that came with the end of socialism. The most massive, the most splendid black marble tables are always found in the proximity of Mafia graves, where biologically unrelated “brothers” of the anti-society of “thieves of the law” are buried together in the same way that members of ordinary society are buried in the same plot with biological kin (see Image 12.3). Regardless of these semiotic and material differences that index various kinds of social distinction, all graveyard tables index an Orthodox milieu of sociability between the living and the dead, but their materiality indexes a postsocialist milieu in which it is possible to build such tables adjacent to graves, the emergent differences of wealth between postsocialist citizens, and the possibility of giving public recognition in death to the nonbiological-kinship-based relations constitutive of the underworld of the thieves, an anti-society that can only express itself publicly in the “heterotopia” of the graveyard (Foucault 1984). Moreover, in the semiotics of the contemporary Georgian cityscape, there is more than a passing resemblance between the “heterotopia” of the graveyard and the “heterotopia” of the park or garden. Historically, supras are strongly associated with outdoor locations, particularly suburban garden complexes that ringed the city. Even today, Georgians sometimes comment that a supra is better if it is outdoors. The association of the supra with a specific kind of outdoor

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

239

“natural” location, the “garden” (baghi), can be found in household supras, because a supra might be “spread” on an indoor table or in the orderly series of recursively nested hybrid spaces from interior to exterior, private to public – the balcony (aivani), courtyard (ezo), or garden (baghi) (see Manning 2009, on the public/private opposition as a recursive opposition; see Gal 2002). Or it might be spread in a public garden. The Russian imperial Tbilisi of the nineteenth century had inherited from the ruins of Safavid to Qajar period Tbilisi (Tiflis) more than anything else a complex network of gardens that surrounded the city.3 While the semiotics of these suburban gardens, surrounding the royal city with the “gardens of Paradise” (Gelashvili n.d.), possibly reflected the hegemony of complex theological and political semiotics of the Safavid cityscape embodied in model Islamic garden-cities such as Isfahan (Pinder-Wilson 1985; Walcher 1998), these gardens left Russian imperial Tbilisi/Tiflis with a rich inheritance of spatial affordances for drinking. The literal ecology of inherited Safavid period gardens were retooled for new semiotic purposes that reflected the orientalist semiotics of the Russian colonial city: certain gardens, including new ones, mostly located to the north of the city, became Europeanized and associated with European ways of appropriating gardens involving “parading” (compare Kaviraj 1997; on the general Orientalist context of images of Tbilisi in this period see for example Manning and Shatirishvili 2011; Manning 2012b, 2013): Before one turns one’s steps to explore oriental Tiflis, with its mazes of narrow streets and bazaars, there remain yet a few sights to see in the more modern town. Especially attractive are the public gardens, situated on the left bank of the Kur, some little way removed from the center of the town. Here at times an excellent military band discourses music, and all the fashionable world of Tiflis parades. It is difficult, then, when walking under shady trees, surrounded by a well-dressed European crowd, to imagine oneself in an Asiatic town. (Harris 1896: 43)

By contrast, Georgian indigenous appropriations of other suburban gardens involved sitting (and drinking), paralleling a broader Safavid Persian model of being-in-a-garden noted by traveler Jean Chardin (1686): “The Persians don’t walk so much in gardens as we do, but content themselves with a bare prospect, and breathing the fresh air: for this end, they set themselves down in some part of the garden, at their first coming into it and never move from their seats till they are going out of it” (cited in Pinder-Wilson 1985: 274).4 Accordingly, other inherited gardens, the most famous being the island-garden of Ortachala, became instead stereotypical nineteenth-century locales for the rather more sedentary “oriental” plebeian urban culture of the supra, celebrated in bohemian art and poetry. The emergent opposition between European and Oriental garden could be encapsulated in the figurational opposition of associated emblematic Maussian “techniques of the body”: walking (not drinking)

240

Language and Materiality

and sitting (drinking). In a poem about the East Georgian city of Telavi, the popular Tbilisi “supra” poet Skandarnova explained the European term bulvari (boulevard) to his readers as a kind of paradoxical chimera: not a kind of street, but “a garden for walking” (saseirno baghi) (Skandarnova 1879: 68). In the nineteenth century the supra (in the sense of tablecloth) was not as stereotypically associated with a table: the literal supra (cloth) could be laid out directly on the ground or at a table. This opposition based on locale became semioticized, invested with the oppositions of Orientalist binaries, according to where and how the participants were seated. An opposition based on the exigencies of immediate geography (whether one was indoors or outdoors) came to be invested with the valences of an Orientalist imaginative geography (whether one was in Europe or Asia). The covers of books of popular poetry to be performed at supras frequently juxtapose images of the supra in these different forms. The front cover of popular “supra” poet Skandarnova’s booklet, “A Feast at Ortachala” (1912) shows traditionally dressed Georgians (all men) seated on the ground in a garden, while the back cover shows a mixed-gender company dressed in European fashion seated at a table on Thonet No. 14 bistro chairs, chairs that have, in Georgia and elsewhere, become an emblematic object of modernist design. The urban ecology of gardens inherited from the Safavid to Qajar periods, which presumably embodied a theological and political semiotics (on which see Walcher 1998), provides a set of semiotic affordances (Manning 2012a: 14); that is, essentially those material properties that afford – constrain or permit – certain semiotic deployments that could be elaborated into the colonial semiotics of the Russian imperial city, in which some gardens were defined as European spaces for walking and others were defined as Oriental or bohemian spaces for sitting and drinking at supras (Manning and Shatirishvili 2011). Similarly, the Orientalist opposition of colonial difference operated recursively to distinguish between European supras seated at tables and Oriental supras sitting on the ground (see Manning 2014). Similarly, Georgian modernists celebrated the “Oriental” bohemia of Ortachala gardens, with picturesque scenes of Georgians drinking seated on the ground, alongside the “European” bohemia of the cafe, with modernized Georgians seated again on emblematic modernist Thonet no. 14 bistro chairs (Manning 2013). How then did this “Oriental” ritual, the supra, come to be associated with “European” embodied practices of sitting at a table? If the supra is arguably a ritual with Persian (possibly Safavid) etymology and antecedents, the tablecloth from which it takes its name produces a set of material potentialities that by the Stalin period allowed the tablecloth itself to become a harbinger of European (socialist) culture and civilization (for Stalin’s propagation of the supra across socialist space see Scott 2016; see Manning 2017 for a summary of Scott’s elegant argument). If the simple cloth (supra) laid on the ground in

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

241

a garden is a sign of its Oriental antecedents, a proper tablecloth (also called a supra), placed on a table indoors, in a room with tasseled curtains, a polka dot lampshade, a rug on the floor, vases with flowers, paintings on the walls, and even a piano, expresses instead a particularly Soviet model of European civilization called “culturedness.” All these features (particularly the curtains, tablecloth, and lampshade) together produce what could be called a “cultured interior,” a set of material objects that both symbolized Stalinist “culturedness” (kul’turnost’) and also acted to instill it. According to the ideology of kul’turnost’, “[t]he objects that surrounded people, their material environment, became instrumental in changing their habits and attitudes. The constant presence of certain objects was supposed to instill kul’turnost’. Among the items of everyday equipment associated with the norms of civilized life, three became fetishized . . . . curtains, lampshades and tablecloths” (Kelly and Volkov 1998: 298–299). As Volkov emphasizes, these cultured objects were not just random emblems of petite-bourgeois aspirations; they worked together “to form a specific ‘object-system’ or an ‘equipmental matrix,’ in which all the elements presupposed one another and together constituted the material infrastructure of kul’turnost’” (Volkov 2000: 222). The shared element between the Safavidinherited supra and this Soviet “equipmental matrix” of kul’turnost’is the tablecloth itself. The tablecloth laid on the ground, outdoors in a garden, with wine drunk to the melody of Oriental poetry, takes on a very different meaning from a tablecloth laid on a table, in a “cultured interior” alongside tasseled curtains and a polka dot lampshade, with moderate drinking, to the sound of classical music played on a piano. The “cultured” supra, which brought together all these elements, can be regarded, perhaps, as a specifically Stalinist form (summarized in the Stalin-era image of an ideal cultured supra that appears on the following page [Image 12.4]). “Culturedness” expressed a rivalry, a state-directed campaign against backwardness and “hooliganism” fought in every socialist home, whose shock troops were the heroic material troika of lampshade, curtain and tablecloth. This rivalry was also fought across the public spaces of socialist society. To combat “uncultured” displays of orgiastic drinking and associated “hooliganism” in public places, the socialist state elaborated a series of cultured spaces antithetical to public drinking: parks of culture and rest, cafes, and tea shops, in particular. But these “cultured” places were rivalrous with the supra, a ritual that could invade other spaces created for nonalcoholic sociability simply by bringing wine to the table. This more general tendency of the supra to invade other spaces of sociability (something I witnessed often in my early fieldwork; very few cafés were immune to being appropriated as a place for the supra) is noted in a satirical cartoon, published in the journal Niangi in 1960 and attributed to an artist named Doni. The joke here is that wine, under normal conditions, is drunk out of glasses that do not differ much from tea glasses, and normally

242

Language and Materiality

Image 12.4 Stalin-era supra

supra toasts begin by mentioning the glass (“with this little glass, I want to drink a toast . . . ”); here the toast is rendered as “with this tea glass, I want to drink a toast.” By Way of a Conclusion: Georgian Tradition and Euro-Modernity at the Table With postsocialism, the socialist supra acquired new rivals, in particular new forms of drink like the American mixed drink or cocktail, and new ways of

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

243

drinking. If Georgians use the drinking of wine at the supra as a material shorthand for Georgian tradition, they adopt drinks from other times and places, most of them farther West, as a kind of material shorthand for their aspirations for “European civilization” or “modernity” (Manning 2012b). Such “otherwise and elsewhere” drinks become rivalrous with the traditional drinks; much more to the point, one can express this rivalry by drinking them instead of the traditional drinks. If the drinks I discussed before are rivals for the role of being the drink with which one finishes a toast, these drinks are rivals with toasting as a whole: they bring their own rivalrous linguistic genres of sociability with them. They either threaten to replace the drink and hegemonic ritual drinking practices of wine and the supra, or they assume some other role, usually some form of elective sociability – in Simmel’s sense (1949), which is not ritually consequential and therefore seemingly free, unencumbered by status or obligation (see Manning 2012a: 56–50, 70–71). Where the glass of wine at the supra is paired with specific words, and the consumption of the wine not only underlines the force of those words but is also a trial, measuring and testing the capacity of the drinker to speak and drink, here the drinks are a more languid liquid measure of duration of small talk, of time spent together, talking and sipping drinks to pass the time. Recently, Westernizing Georgians have sought to enact Western identities by reforming their drinking habits, sometimes using models from the West, including both new drinks – for example, the cocktail and, specifically, the martini – and associated new ways of drinking them; for example, the cocktail party. I first became aware of this revolutionary, rivalrous tendency a number of years ago when a young female friend of mine announced she had had a birthday party, and I asked her if she had has a birthday supra as would have been traditional. Her face darkened, and she said, “No, we had a ‘democracy’ instead!” When I asked her what a “democracy” was, she said it was a kind of anti-supra, modeled on a Western cocktail party, with no “stupid rules,” no toasting, and no toastmaster. Like many Georgians, she saw in the rigid ritual structure of the supra a kind of miniature model of Stalinism (Stalin, after all, loved to drink wine at the supra! [see Scott 2016 for more about Stalinism and the supra in general]), and for her and her generation, their aspirations for a democratic Georgia were matched by new Western forms of alcohol consumption modeled on cocktail parties with suggestive names like “Democracy.” In adopting the cocktail party as a miniature model of free elective sociability unencumbered by status attributes, sharply contrasted with traditional “rituals” that instead reinforced status attributes, she was reiterating a theme of mid-century sociology of sociability (Manning 2012a: 68–76). The drinks themselves that are emblematic of these different rituals differ in important basic respects. Georgian alcoholic drinks used for toasting are in general characterizable by the absence of mixture. Each drink – wine, vodka, cognac – is always consumed in its purity and always drunk to the bottom.

244

Language and Materiality

Cocktails instead are defined by impurity or mixture, and they are sipped, rather than drained. Once, sitting in a café in a park in Tbilisi, a Georgian friend and I noticed they were selling gin and tonics. The gin was a deep dark poisonous yellow and I did not know what they intended to use for tonic, but out of the same curiosity that killed the cat, we decided to drink this beverage and, after a sip or two, decided to go back to beer forever. The point was not that the gin and tonic was horrible; one can get horrible gin and tonics almost anywhere. The point is that they had them at all, and that one could get them just at those places you could get beer or coffee. Perhaps gin and tonics, even bad ones, represent a model of Georgian aspirational modernity, striving to incarnate the imaginary West here and now, but failing miserably. More to the point, they are mixed drinks, not appropriate for ritual drinking, but possible for sociable drinking, the same sort of drinking associated with coffee or beer. The most surefire index that a drink is “ritual” (and this is an indigenous category to some extent) is that you need to bless it; that is, you need to say a toast before you drink it; the most surefire sign that a drink is not a ritual one, but a sociable one, is that you just drink it, or rather, you do not drink it all at once – you sip it, enjoy it for its own sake at your own pace. Once, I made some friends of mine an approximation of a dry martini (I used gin and vermouth one can buy in Tbilisi, all of it standard). I noticed that while they would drink vodka or similar alcohols (including, to my horror, gin and cognac) in shots drunk to a toast, they neither said a toast to the martini, nor did they drink it in a single draught. They sipped it. Later, my host decided to experiment with the whole cocktail genre and took some local grappa-like drink called “Ch’ach’a” (normally drunk in shots with a toast), mixed it with a fruity compote made of wild plum, and made a mixed drink out of it, which he named jocularly after our working-class neighborhood, “the Zemka” (Z.M.K.). Again, we sipped the zemka much as we sipped our martinis. It seemed, then, that the defining property of the cocktail, which was mixture, was easily grasped, and added to this was the additional local understanding that since it was mixed, and not pure, one could not say a toast to it and one could sip it as one chose. Pure alcoholic drinks are transacted in a “traditional” ritual idiom of toasting and draining to the bottom, mixed alcoholic drinks (like nonalcoholic and low alcoholic drinks like beer) in a “modern, Western” sociable idiom of unrelated or loosely calibrated acts of talking and sipping. This casual, sociable “modern, Western” consumption of drinks like beer or mixed drinks like cocktails, which is marked by a mixture of sipping, tasting, and small talk, is the polar opposite of “traditional” ritual styles of drinking that draw together a certain ritualized style of speaking – saying a toast – with the draining of a large glass filled with a ritual drink like wine or vodka. What is interesting is that this new form of sociable drinking is something we have

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

245

also found associated with new postsocialist Georgian wine consumption. As Adam Walker and I have argued (Walker and Manning 2013), Georgian socialist period wine was produced with a typically socialist emphasis on the quantity of production, and the supra ritual under socialism emphasized in turn, quantitative forms of consumption: As I showed earlier, the supra almost always explores indexical and iconic figurations of symmetry of quantity between pairings of word and drink. Most commonly, the “logic” of the supra that emphasizes the consumption of large quantities of wine at one go is visually represented by the use of the drinking horn shown in Image 12.2. Semiotic ecologies of drinks and drinking are shifting in concert, contributing new – though perhaps predictable – rivalries. Postsocialist production of Georgian wine, however, revolves around changing socialist quantitative production into the postsocialist production of wines of quality. This new Georgian “quality” wine, rivalrous with European wines, is associated with new “European” forms of consumption of wine unthinkable twenty years ago. If socialism emphasized quantity, then contemporary wine drinking is dominated by iconic and indexical figurations of “quality” between drink and drinker: the production of new Georgian wines of European “quality” is matched by the production of new Georgian consumers who have these same qualities. Such “quality” wine can be purchased in quantity for the supra or in smaller European style bottles for nonsupra consumption, because a “clear, aromatic white wine that is both deserving of sociable sipping from European-style stemmed glasses and ritual toasting from Georgian drinking horns . . . [is] the very same wine, depending on whether it is purchased in labeled bottles or in bulk, can be consumed very differently in different ways. European style bottled wine is drunk in ways that emphasize the quality of the wine, the wine is sipped for its taste without attendant toasts, while the same wine, purchased in bulk, is drunk to toasts out of traditional glasses drained to the bottom” (Walker and Manning 2013: 216). The rivalry comes full circle: new wines, too, can be poured into old semiotic bottles. N OT E S 1 For an exemplary study of such “cross-modal iconism” embracing the properties of drinks, language, voice, and persons, see Harkness (2013). 2 Perry (1996, cited in Perry 2001) connects the supra to Safavid Persian antecedents (and seems to be supported by the observations of Safavid period travelers such as Jean Chardin). http://7buruk.blogspot.ca/2010/02/historical-role-of-turkish-inrelation.html. 3 These are clearly marked in Vakhushti Bagrationi’s early map from 1735, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vakhushti._plan_of_tbilisi._1735.gif, and described by Jean Chardin. 4 https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/chardin/chardin.htm.

246

Language and Materiality

REFERENCES Chardin, Jean. 1686. Journal du voyage du chevalier Chardin en Perse et aux Indes Orientales par la Mer Noire et par la Colchide. Pitt. Chumley, Lily. 2013. “Evaluation regimes and the qualia of quality.” Anthropological Theory 13(1/2):169–183. Chumley, Lily, and Nicholas Harkness. 2013. “Introduction: QUALIA.” Anthropological Theory 13(1/2): 3–11. Ellis, Markman. 2008. “An introduction to the coffee house: A discursive model.” Language & Communication 28:156–164. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité October (March 1967). Frake, C. 1964. “How to ask for a drink in Subanun.” American Anthropologist 66(6):127–132. Gal, S. 2002. “A semiotics of the public/private distinction.” Differences 15(1):77–95. Gelashvili, Akaki. n.d. Irakli II. www.fereidani.ge/121_kako/121_kako.html. Gershon, Ilana and Paul Manning. 2014. “Language and media.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by N. J. Enfield, Paul Kockelman, and Jack Sidnell, 557–576. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harkness, Nicholas. 2013. “Softer soju in South Korea.” Anthropological Theory 13(1/2):12–30. 2015. “The pragmatics of qualia in practice.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 573–589. Harris, Walter. 1896. From Batum to Baghdad. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons. Herzfeld, Michael. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hull, Matthew. 2012. “Documents and bureaucracy.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 41:251–267. Iskander, F. 1983. Sandro of Chegem. Translated by Susan Brownsberger. New York: Vintage Books. Karp, I. 1980. “Beer drinking and social experience in an African society: An essay in formal sociology.” In Explorations in African Systems of Thought, edited by Ivan Karp and C. S. Bird, 83–119. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1997. “Filth and the public sphere: Concepts and practices about space in Calcutta.” Public Culture 10(1):83–113. Kelly, C. and Volkov, V. 1998. “Directed desires: Kult’urnost’ and consumption.” In Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881–1940, edited by Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, 291–313. New York: Oxford University Press. Kinkladze, Z. 2000. Karakul Sadghegrdzeloebi. Tbilisi. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laurier, E. 2008. “Drinking up endings: Conversational resources of the café.” Language & Communication 28:165–181. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. “Structuralism and ecology.” Social Science Information 12:7–23. Manning, Paul. 2009. “The city of balconies: Elite politics and the changing semiotics of the post-socialist cityscape.” In Urban Cultures, Urban Futures: City Culture

The Semiotic Ecology of Drinks and Talk in Georgia

247

and City Planning in Georgia, edited by K. Van Assche, J. Salukvadze, and N. Shavishvili, 71–102. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press. 2012a. Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. London: Bloomsbury 2012b. Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. Brighton: Academic Studies Press. 2013. “The theory of the café central and the practice of the café peripheral: Aspirational and abject infrastructures of sociability on the European periphery.” In Cafe Society, edited by Aksel Tjora and Graham Scrambler, 43–65. New York: Palgrave McMillan. 2014. “Domestication of the wild supra.” Ab Imperio 4:53–62. 2017. “When the guest becomes the host: Review of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of the Soviet Empire.” Diaspora 19(2010):351– 360. Manning, Paul and Zaza Shatirishvili. 2011. “The exoticism and eroticism of the city: The “kinto” and his city.” In Urban Spaces after Socialism: Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities, edited by Tsypylma Darieva et al., 261–281. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Mass Observation. 1987 [1943]. The Pub and the People. London: Cresset Library. Nakassis, Constantine. 2013. “Materiality, materialization.” HAU 3(3):399–406. Peirce, C. S. 1868. “Some consequences of four incapacities.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2:140–157. Perry, John. 2001. “The historical role of Turkish in relation to Persian of Iran.” Iran & the Caucasus 5:193–200. Pinder-Wilson, Ralph. 1985. “The Persian garden: Bagh and Chahar Bagh.” In Studies in Islamic Art, 273–286. London: Pindar Press. Pruidze, Levan. 2001. “Ganatlebulta dilet’ant’izmi anu ras erchit erovnuli cxovrebis ts’ess da kartul supras?” Lit’eraturuli sakartvelo February 9–12:12–13. Ram, Harsha. 2007. “The sonnet and the Mukhambazi: Genre wars on the edges of the Russian Empire.” PMLA 122(5):1548–1570. Rawsthorn, Alice. 2008. “No. 14: The chair that has seated millions.” www.nytimes .com/2008/11/10/arts/10iht-design10.1.17621906.html?_r-0. Scott, E. R. 2016. Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sheil, Lady. 1856. Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia. London: John Murray, Albemarle Atreet. Simmel, G. 1949. The sociology of sociability. American Journal of Sociology 55(3):254–261. Skandarnova, Giorgi. 1879. Msunagi k”atsis tsxovreba.. Tblisi: A. A. Mikhelson. Stasch, Rupert. 2014. Linguistic Anthropology and Sociocultural Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Volkov, V. 2000. “The concept of kul’turnost’: Notes on the Stalinist civilizing process.” In Stalinism: New Directions, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick, 210–230. London: Routledge. Walcher, Heidi. 1998. “Between paradise and political capital: The semiotics of Safavid Isfahan.” Yale Forestry and Environmental Studies Bulletin 103:330–348. Walker, Adam and Paul Manning. 2013. Georgian wine: The transformation of socialist quantity into postsocialist quality. In Wine and Culture: Vineyard to Glass, edited by Rachel Black and Robert Ulin, 201–220. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Part IV

More Stuff: Short Topical Commentaries on Language and Materiality and Afterword

Can Language Be a Commodity? Monica Heller

At least since Pierre Bourdieu proposed that language could be understood as a form of symbolic capital exchangeable both for other forms of symbolic capital and for material ones, in specific “linguistic markets,” linguistic anthropologists and other interested parties have been debating whether he was speaking metaphorically or not. The debate has heated up more recently as we have empirically witnessed a shift in how language is discussed, especially (but not only) in public policy, from a heretofore dominant emphasis on language as an autonomous system. Often this system is thought of as a cognitive one, embedded in individual and collective bodies who have a right to their languages, facing an emergent discourse treating language as a set of resources having economic value, indeed as a set of commodities with exchange value. To the extent to which language is understood as having exchange value, it becomes necessary to start thinking of it either in relation to material objects (which also have value and for which language can be exchanged) or as a material object itself. This requires therefore some grappling with what have long been other ideologies of language, at least in the Western tradition, and that treat it as abstract and symbolic. From some perspectives, analytically and empirically we are witnessing a purely discursive shift, and we should be careful not to mistake discourse for material reality; we should, in other words, understand the discourse of language and market and resource and capital as metaphorical or risk falling into the trap of reproducing neoliberal pressures to see everything as economic, ourselves included. From other perspectives, language might be tied in some way to economic exchanges, but cannot directly participate in them unless we can show that it can be directly translated into fiscal terms; that is, unless you can put a price tag on some unit of language. But here I want to argue against both critiques of understanding language literally, not metaphorically, as a form of capital that can act as a commodity. First, we have empirical evidence of attempts to treat language as a commodity, even if those attempts do not always work out cleanly and neatly. In some

251

252

Language and Materiality

Canadian call centers, the ability to speak French is understood to be worth about a dollar an hour more pay; translators charge by the word; consumers of “authentic” goods request performance of linguistic authenticity as part of what they are buying; the word “chocolate” in ten languages covers a box of Swiss chocolates; Japanese kanji may win contests (see Miller, Chapter 3, this volume); and so on. The attempts are messy, are not always successful, compete with other ideologies and practices of language, but they exist. We therefore need to account for them – explain why they appear when they do, why they are linked to the activities they are linked to, and how they get produced, circulated, and converted or consumed. This leads to my second argument, which is that we can examine these circuits or processes, and in particular, identify when linguistic forms or practices are convertible; that is, linked to exchanges in which resources are produced and distributed, whether those resources are monetary or not. We can examine how language is linked to the materiality of, say, chocolate, and to how chocolate’s material qualities bear on its market value. But we can also explore the ways in which the material form of language (or better, communication) itself figures in. Its material expression or enactment (in the body; in the relationship between body, sound, and space; in scriptural forms; in images) is a result of language’s use in the construction both of meaning and of value. Which linguistic resources (observable in embodied practices and material expression) are available to whom, and who gets to decide their value, are questions precisely of how language is used to make social difference and social inequality, given that resources are never equally distributed and people are not usually interested in making them so. It is not that language is always convertible, but it can be. As Bourdieu pointed out, mastery not only of certain forms but also of certain embodied practices is understood to index social positions, which are understood to grant speakers and hearers legitimacy and authority (or not), under certain social conditions. He refers to those conditions as a market, insofar as they set the terms for what is available and what is not (and to whom) – including access to the market itself and determining what the relative (exchangeable) value is of what resources for what other resources. You need the right kind of capital (of any and all kinds) to be a player, to invest and exchange, to make a profit – whether that profit is prestige or food or fancy clothes. Indeed, of course, all those forms of profit are intertwined in processes that are, essentially, communicative. This requires holding in the same frame particular linguistic (or, let us say more broadly, communicative) forms or performances that are treated as commodities, as well as the communicative means in which they are produced, exchanged, and assigned value. The core set of questions, which we have yet to really investigate systematically, concerns what

Can Language Be a Commodity?

253

forms or practices are convertible to what, under what market conditions. Yes, demographers have long calculated whether being bilingual is correlated with higher revenue; sociologists examine whether language education credentials do or do not correlate with access to prestigious higher education or well-paying jobs. But we do not really understand what lies behind those correlations or how the exchange process works. Similarly, despite the fact that we possess a great deal of detailed ethnographic data on the interactional workings of key sites, such as schooling, it is often still the case that we lack the data that would help us understand what conditions help explain how linguistic performances are evaluated in those settings. Working through a lens of materiality, both in the sense of language’s relationship to other forms of materiality and in the connected sense of the value accorded to linguistic form and practice, can help us better understand how these processes work. Finally, we should ask whether there is anything empirically new in what we are seeing or whether we are simply asking questions we could have asked long ago. I think both are true. The ways we have been posing queries (as in the examples I have just provided) need to be extended, understood as a process in which (among other things, of course) conversion happens (or fails to), under certain conditions. We can do a better job of connecting the dots, following the process, seeing where it comes from and where it leads, under what conditions; that is, when specific kinds of resources are available. But at the same time, the economy-expanding conditions of late capitalism also intensify competition and heighten the economic role of language in a number of ways (see Heller and Duchêne 2012 for a fuller development of this argument). First, the extension of networks of circulation of goods and people in and of itself requires forms of management that entail more communicative mediation. This is probably the area where we are most likely to find new developments, such as expanding language education industries (sometimes coupled with tourism, volunteerism, or domestic service) or human or machine translation services; this is also an area where we see tension between understanding language as a skill and language as a talent. A focus on language materiality might help us unravel these complex processes. Second, intensified competition leads to niche markets and niche products, and one of the ways in which you can define them is through linguistic difference; that is, in the forging or reframing of links between linguistic and other materialities. Third, greater competition also leads to a search for added value, including symbolic value; and here is where we have the most evidence of linguistic commodification – in the mobilization of the semiotic resources of authenticity produced by Romantic nationalism repurposed as symbolic added value in such fields as tourism. What we have then is perhaps extension, and intensification, of existing trends, rather than an

254

Language and Materiality

entirely new phenomenon, but with increasing tensions between nation-state and postnational ideologies of language. REFERENCE Heller, Monica and Alexandre Duchêne. 2012. Pride and profit: Changing discourses of language, capital and nation-state. In Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit, edited by Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller, 1–21. London: Routledge.

Language, Music, Materiality (and Immateriality): Entanglements beyond the “Symbolic” Paja Faudree

“Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” – Flannery O’Connor

O’Connor’s (1979: 125) famous quote casts the Eucharist not as a “mere symbol” but rather as “the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.” She thus casts the Eucharist as a powerful material force, the epitome of the “real.” From one angle, her words reinscribe the Cartesian (Saussurean) bifurcation of the lived universe into material and ideational realms – a perspective that much linguistic anthropological research, including this volume, aims to transcend. But from another vantage, her depiction reminds us that materiality, like ostensibly “symbolic” aspects of social life, is likewise subject to relativism and hence must be investigated ethnographically. By insisting on the materiality of something others view as symbolic, O’Connor adopts a position that would be familiar to many people I have come to know over the last decade and a half in the Sierra Mazateca. Most people who live in this mountainous region of Mexico speak Mazatec, an indigenous tonal language. Among linguists, the Sierra is best known for its whistle speech: a register in which speakers communicate entirely by whistling, following the tonal contours of spoken language. Among anthropologists and others, it is famous for the ritual use of mushrooms. During their use in night-long ceremonies, language and music are densely entangled with materiality. Using language in certain ways – spoken, chanted, sung, or whistled – is performative, instantiating bodily healing; other language practices make manifest the presence of invisible spirits who guide the rituals. My commentary is informed by my ongoing work to understand such aspects of how people in the Sierra perceive the world – sometimes in surprising ways stemming from different assumptions about what counts as material or “real,” a calculus in which language and music are often implicated. I take the position here that investigating materiality ethnographically is usefully animated by joint attention to language and music. By “materiality,” I 255

256

Language and Materiality

invoke both those aspects of social life with physical manifestations – forms people can perceive through their senses – and how such forms are embedded political economies: frameworks through which power is exercised (see Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). I also include elements of linguistic structure that oblige speakers to attend to aspects of the world around them – including producing the sensibly perceptible phonemes (and sometimes corresponding graphemes) that conform to its rules – and whose use in turn interpellates speakers as particular types of subjects. Language and music – although often cast on the symbolic side of the Cartesian divide – are, when viewed in concert, often distinguished through differential engagement with materiality. Take certain widely circulating (Western) ideas about language and music: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s claim that “music is the universal language of mankind,” Hans Christian Andersen’s “where words fail, music speaks,” Victor Hugo’s “music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent,” or Steven Pinker’s assertion that “music is an enigma” (whereas language, it is implied, is not; see Keane and Silverstein, Chapter 2, this volume). These quotes and their endless popular reentextualizations promote views wherein the differences between language and music are materially important: music can travel to places and do things language cannot. Furthermore, such ideas become linked to political economies with material entailments, as when institutions invest significant resources in music training programs as an antidote to religious violence or class-based disenfranchisement (e.g., Venezuela’s El Sistema, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra). Yet in other cultural contexts, the relationships among language, music, and materiality may be conceived differently, variously structuring human engagement with the physical world. For ethnographic examinations of music and language to throw Western assumptions about them into relief, they must consider how both categories of expression are differentially imbricated with materiality, thus escaping easy confinement to purely representational worlds. Despite the long history of inquiry into relations between music and language (Feld and Fox 1994; Feld et al. 2004; Weidman 2014a; Faudree 2016), scholars working at that disciplinary interface have generally attended only sporadically to materiality. Furthermore, agendas linking materiality to either language or music sometimes produce tendencies to downplay the importance of the other. For example, research in sound studies – an exciting new field engaging in sophisticated ways with the materiality of music – and related work have helped decenter the “ocularcentric” biases pervading academic production (Feld and Brenneis 2004; Hirschkind 2006; Samuels et al. 2010; Sterne 2012). However, the drive to decenter written texts sometimes risks dismissing language use more generally. Similarly, phenomenologically informed work on the senses, emotions, and “qualia” productively foregrounds the dialectal tension between perceptual substrates of experience and the social processes – including

Language, Music, Materiality (and Immateriality)

257

linguistic and musical practices – through which experience becomes meaningful (Berger 2010; Porcello et al. 2010; Chumley and Harkness 2013). However, such work attends unevenly to how music and language are sometimes differentially, sometimes synergistically, implicated in that tension. Nevertheless, some scholars do embrace a holistic approach where language and music encompass a unified expressive field whose segmentation into discrete categories is culturally constructed, often through diverse engagements with materiality (see Faudree 2012 for a review). In this commentary, I discuss examples of this work by delineating two themes that have been among the most generative: voice and technological mediation. Voice jointly embraces musical and linguistic aspects of human expression, and distinct meanings of “voice” invite diverse engagements with materiality. An attention to voice stresses how language and music are anchored in embodied human voices and the physicality of sound; it also foregrounds metaphorical understandings that invoke agency, subjectivity, and political positioning. Keeping these distinct meanings of voice in tension enables an analytically powerful strategy: language and music become grounded in embodied processes of vocal production and in the political economies through which subjects differentiated by race, gender, sexuality, class, and so on, become interpellated into social hierarchies. One earlier study demonstrating this strategy’s potential is Samuels’s (2004) work on Apache musicians, whose covers of standard country songs often avoid dipthongs, the “twanging” vocalic qualities prevalent in the original recordings. This voicing is a product not only of material phonological constraints, particularly for singers whose first language is not English, but also stems from engagement with political economies surrounding language variation: by rejecting the accents used in the originals, Apache singers distance themselves from the white Southern identities they index. Minks’s (2013) more recent work among indigenous Miskitu children demonstrates how material aspects of speech and song – timbre and other vocal qualities, codeswitching, metricality, gestures, and dance movements – produce children as gendered subjects. My work in the Sierra Mazateca on language revival (Faudree 2013, 2014) likewise links language and music to materiality through voice. I document how a regional language revitalization movement has been widely successful because it introduced innovative singing and writing practices in Mazatec – including circulation of such material manifestations as printed books, handwritten song sheets, and audio and video recordings – that draw on material aspects of the language itself: its tonality and whistled register. Such features make the language a rich resource for song composition, a potentiality magnified by the central role Mazatec vocal performance plays in key socialization events, including mushroom rituals. As in the last case, attention to voice is often tied to technological mediation, including linguistic technologies such as writing and those involving

258

Language and Materiality

music, performance, and sound. The materiality of the texts and recordings that the Mazatec revival movement generated – including their emergence as commodities and their circulation through face-to-face interactions and, increasingly, online exchange – is central to their popularity. Their material dimensions include orthographic choice or decisions to write, sing, or whistle in Mazatec rather than Spanish, which in turn invoke alliances and animosities across diverse temporal and spatial scales (Faudree 2016). Other research has likewise focused on how specific technologies mediate and materialize music and language. One such study is Meintjes’s work (2003) on the making of South African Zulu music. She documents how boosting its commercial appeal by “making the music Zulu” relied on manipulating the materiality of the music’s sound – from vocal qualities like timbre to distinctive phonological features of the language, such as its famous clicks – in an effort to position the recordings alongside other globally circulating Afropop albums. More recent work in this vein includes Shipley’s study (2013) on Ghanian hip-hop and Weidman’s work (2014b) on playback singers in India’s film industry. These authors, like Meintjes, document how particular forms of commercial music production are shaped not only by specific linguistic and vocalic affordances of the registers and speech genres through which people interact in making the music but also by the materiality of specific recording technologies and the circulation of the resulting products. These approaches foreground the diverse ways that distinctions between language and music – as well as their synergies and intersections – are intimately, variably bound to materiality. One advantage of taking a capacious approach toward analyzing human expression (linguistic, musical, or otherwise) is precisely that it can foster resistance to the ever-present trap of reverting to Cartesian dichotomies by, say, uncritically deploying such categories as “expressive culture” and “material culture.” At the same time, embracing materiality too completely risks losing the ability to grapple with its limits. For materiality to be an ethnographic object, we must subject not only it but also the constellation of objects around it to ethnographic analysis as well. We must ask how materiality is linked to key terms discussed here (language, music, expression, voice, embodiment, technology, mediation) and at the same time examine that which is immaterial, intangible, ephemeral, disembodied, and so on. For using materiality as an axis of differentiation is a move cast against the background of its absence, negation, irrelevance. Hence studying music and language by assessing their entanglements with materiality requires moving beyond views holding up either or both up as purely “symbolic.” But that effort also crucially depends upon contending with what stands apart from materiality, lest we inadvertently reinscribe binary divisions between material and immaterial worlds precisely in the attempt to move beyond them.

Language, Music, Materiality (and Immateriality)

259

REFERENCES Berger, Harris M. 2010. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Chumley, Lily Hope and Nicholas Harkness, eds. 2013. Special Issue on “Qualia.” Anthropological Theory 13(1–2). Faudree, Paja. 2012. “Music, language, and texts: Sound and semiotic ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 519–536. 2013. Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014. “The Annual Day of the Dead Song Contest: Musical-linguistic ideology and practice, piratability, and the challenge of scale.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(2): 293–314. 2015. “Singing for the dead, on and off line: Diversity, migration, and scale in Mexican Muertos music.” Language & Communication 44: 31–43. 2016. Music and language. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Feld, Steven, and Donald Brenneis. 2004. “Doing anthropology in sound.” American Ethnologist 31(4): 461–474. Feld, Steven, and Aaron A. Fox. 1994. “Music and language.” Annual Review of Anthropology: 25–53. Feld, Steven, Aaron A. Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels. 2004. “Vocal anthropology: From the music of language to the language of song.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Allessandro Duranti, 321–45. New York: Wiley. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The ethical soundscape: Cassette sermons and Islamic counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making music Zulu in a South African studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Minks Amanda. 2013. Voices of play: Miskitu children’s speech and song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. O’Connor, Flannery. 1979. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor Sally Fitzgerald, ed., edited by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Porcello, Thomas, et al. 2010. “The reorganization of the sensory world.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 51–66. Samuels, David W. 2004. Putting a song on top of it: Expression and identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Samuels, David W., et al. 2010. “Soundscapes: Toward a sounded anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 329–345. Shankar, Shalini, and Jillian R. Cavanaugh. 2012. “Language and materiality in global capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 355–369. Shipley, Jesse Weaver. 2013. Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sterne, Jonathan, ed. 2012. The sound studies reader. London: Routledge. Weidman, Amanda. 2014a. “Anthropology and voice.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 37–51. 2014b. “Neoliberal logics of voice: Playback singing and public femaleness in South India.” Culture, Theory and Critique 55(2): 175–193.

Why Bodies Matter∗ Mary Bucholtz

On a Friday evening in May 2014, Isla Vista, the student-dominated community adjacent to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I am a professor, was suddenly ripped apart by a series of horrific acts of violence. I began drafting this commentary soon after these incidents took place, and as I reflected on language and materiality from the standpoint of linguistic anthropology, it was difficult to think about anything else. My profession had left me wholly unprepared to deal with the shock, the pain, the loss, the violation that the Santa Barbara community had experienced; academics generally avoid bringing our own emotions into our scholarly discourse. Yet my profession also offered me tools for thinking, alone and in conversation with others, about what had happened – the sense-making tools of theory and analysis.1 Reduced to the official facts, one account of that evening goes like this (Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office 2015): in the early evening of May 23, 2014, a twenty-two-year-old man named Elliot Rodger stabbed to death his two roommates and a visiting friend in their shared apartment in Isla Vista. Some three hours later, Rodger uploaded a short video labeled “Retribution” to YouTube, laying out his murderous plans, and emailed his parents and thirty-two other people a 137-page document titled “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger.” He then left the apartment in his black BMW, armed with three semiautomatic handguns and more than four hundred rounds of ammunition. He drove to a nearby sorority house, where he planned to murder all the women inside; unable to get past the locked door, he shot three other women on the sidewalk, killing two and seriously injuring the third. Rodger’s next stop was a convenience store, where he killed one man. He continued to careen through

∗

I am very grateful to the members of my Fall 2015 graduate class, Linguistics 232: Foundations of Sociocultural Linguistics, both for helping me work through the difficult ideas and emotions raised in the writing of this commentary and for their courage in collectively revisiting the darkest moment in our institution’s history. Thanks are also due to the volume editors and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful suggestions, which have greatly improved the text, and to Anne Charity Hudley, who offered valuable references and ideas. Finally, I thank Kira Hall for her deeply insightful discussions of embodiment in linguistic anthropology. The remaining weaknesses in this commentary are mine alone.

260

Why Bodies Matter

261

the crowded streets of Isla Vista, injuring thirteen other people both by gunfire and with his vehicle. Finally, wounded by the sheriff’s deputies pursuing him, he fatally shot himself in the head before he could be taken into custody; his shooting rampage had taken only eight minutes. The title of my commentary responds to that of Judith Butler’s (1993) poststructuralist feminist classic, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” which theorizes materiality as a discursive effect (see also Ramanathan 2010). While Butler’s argument importantly advances an understanding of the sexed and gendered body as more than a straightforward physical fact, and her theory of performativity sheds light on the material effects of language, her perspective is inadequate to capturing the multifaceted and culturally situated relationships between discourse and materiality, relationships that have been most fully explicated within linguistic anthropology (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). As the editors of this volume rightly point out in their introduction, language is not simply linked to materiality; it is, in itself, inherently material. They go on to trace the broad remit of a materialist view of language, from sensory experience to the structures and technologies of global capitalism. This inclusive perspective is a welcome incitement to linguistic anthropologists and other scholars concerned with language, culture, and society to expand their attention to phenomena that might be overlooked in a narrower framing. I would caution, however, that to prevent linguistic anthropology’s copious conceptualization of materiality from dematerializing, as it were, into vague abstraction, it is necessary to anchor our theorizing of the materiality of language in the embodiment of language, that most enduring fact of human communication (Bucholtz and Hall 2016). Embodiment is not simply one aspect of materiality among others; it is the sine qua non of materiality – and of language. Even in technologically mediated spheres, language is always produced and perceived by physical bodies, via eyes, ears, hands, tongues, and lungs. It is almost grotesquely obvious to point out that the events in Isla Vista were saturated with materiality, even well beyond the most glaring example – the murders that Rodger committed. Issues of materiality underlay both his actions and his motivations, as well as their representations in subsequent media reports and commentary. To begin with, his violent acts were carried out by means of human-made objects designed or used as weapons: knives, guns, and a motor vehicle. Yet these acts emerged from his earlier pattern of minor, almost pathetic assaults with decidedly nondeadly weapons: Rodger described in his written “manifesto” – as it was widely labeled – his odd habit of splashing beverages on affectionate couples and on women who did not show interest in him.

262

Language and Materiality

Rodger’s communicative practices were also materially mediated; he expressed his feelings primarily via digital technologies, using online video and discussion sites as well as his word-processed manifesto as outlets for his rage and bitterness. Moreover, these texts revealed that Rodger was greatly concerned with the material trappings of capitalist success and that he sought to transcend his middle-class socioeconomic background. The child of financially struggling film industry parents, he resented growing up in the shadow of Hollywood’s wealth and fame, and after his parents’ divorce he was angry with his mother for not marrying a rich suitor. He viewed symbols of affluence such as his prized (used) BMW 328i luxury coupe, purchased by his mother as a gift to him, as the key to sexual conquest. He unsuccessfully played the lottery, hoping that by becoming a multimillionaire he could win the admiration and sexual experience he craved. Finally, materiality was evident after the killings in the way that Rodger was interpellated into medicalized discourses, via news reports that he was in therapy, rumors that he had Asperger syndrome, and amateur psychologists’ speculative diagnoses ranging from narcissism to bipolar disorder (cf. Kang 2014). But most fundamentally, Rodger’s obsession with materiality was evident in his focus on racial, gendered, and sexualized embodiment. He was a selfidentified “involuntary celibate” inspired by the highly misogynistic “men’s rights movement”; he desired yet hated blonde women, valorized whiteness, and despised men of color as well as his own Asian heritage (he was of both Malaysian and white British descent). His digital rants featured blatant expressions of misogyny and racism, and at least some of the victims of his violence were targeted on the basis of race and gender: all three of the men he murdered in his apartment were Asian American, and he set out into Isla Vista afterward with the deliberate intention of killing women. The material dimension of Rodger’s crimes is thus abundantly clear, but the linguistic dimension is perhaps less so. Indeed, given the overwhelmingly material reality of mass murder, it may seem bizarre, and even trivializing, to link this atrocity to “mere” language. Yet in the ensuing hours, days, and weeks, as journalists and commentators on social media scrutinized every aspect of Rodger’s actions and motivations, it emerged that his acts of violence were thoroughly entangled with acts of language. These included his hate-filled posts on websites variously focused on body building, sexual frustration, and pickup artists and their detractors; his encounters with local law enforcement in the months leading up to the attacks; his series of YouTube videos and his manifesto, which circulated online, in which he had meticulously documented his murderous plans and motives; his email message to his parents and acquaintances in the midst of his frenzy of violence; and his brief interactions with his intended and actual victims, some of which were reported by survivors.

Why Bodies Matter

263

Language was also crucial to members of the UC Santa Barbara campus community both during and after the attacks: campus members were sent emergency alerts by text and campus email, and many of us monitored developments via witnesses’ posts to Twitter, the only information source quick enough to provide real-time updates as events rapidly unfolded. A makeshift graffiti wall memorializing Rodger’s victims, constructed in the central part of campus soon after the murders, provided public space for written expressions of love, loss, and grief; a campus remembrance event offered additional opportunities for speeches, songs, and reflections. And most poignantly for me, in our class discussions in the days following the murders my undergraduate students referred to the killer, who was not a UCSB student and was not known to any of them, by his first name, Elliot – even this small humanizing act, so jarring to my ears, was a matter of language. As a feminist with a political commitment to examining the workings of race, gender, and sexuality, and as a linguistic anthropologist with an analytic commitment to understanding the consequentiality of even the briefest of social actions and interactions, I continue to struggle to make sense of the mass murder that Elliot Rodger perpetrated, which is too easily labeled a “senseless” act of violence. But the starting point for understanding is clear: at some level it aligns with all-too-familiar discourses of bodies and embodiment. Whatever else can be said of Rodger’s actions, they are indisputably and inescapably about bodies: those he found beautiful and those he found revolting, those who had sex and those who did not, those who were killed or injured, and those who dragged friends and strangers to safety. And they are equally about language: what the killer said and wrote, how he interacted online and face to face, and what may have been his last words, an unintelligible shout from his car to a young woman on the sidewalk, followed by a gunshot. Thus Elliot Rodger’s acts of violence – his shocking violation of the bodily integrity of other human beings – and the discourses that authorized these acts, at least in his own mind, force us to confront the specificity of embodiment and its intimate connection to language. Linguistic anthropologists unquestionably need big-picture theorizing that helps us trace the linguistic dimensions of economic and political processes across time and space. But to stay analytically grounded and empirically accountable, scholars must examine these processes in relation to the everyday embodied and discursive worlds of social actors. Taking a large-scale view of such worlds obscures the agency of individuals to bring about change – whether for good or ill – on the so-called small scale, in the lives of real people. Even now, I do not feel ready – perhaps I will never feel ready – to offer a fully worked-out theoretical or analytic account of that summer evening, what led up to it, and what followed afterward. But such events push us to think

264

Language and Materiality

harder about the relationship between language and materiality and the roots of both in the human body. N OT E 1 A longer version of this chapter appears on my website (http://tinyurl.com/lj5tbtd). REFERENCES Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall 2016. “Embodied sociolinguistics.” In Sociolinguistics: Theoretical debates, edited by Nikolas Coupland, 158–173. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York: Routledge. Kang, Jay Caspian 2014. The online life of Elliot Rodger. New Yorker (May 28). www .newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-online-life-of-elliot-rodger Ramanathan, Vaidehi 2010. “Introduction: Why bodies matter.” In Bodies and language: Health, ailments, disabilities, 1–17. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office 2015. Isla Vista mass murder May 23, 2014 investigative summary. www.sbsheriff.us/documents/ ISLAVISTAINVESTIGATIVESUMMARY.pdf. Shankar, Shalini, and Jillian R. Cavanaugh 2012. “Language and materiality in global capitalism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:355–369.

Physicality and Texts: Rematerializing the Transparent Jennifer Dickinson

As the editors discuss in their introduction to this volume, “language” as an object of study is most often conceived of as transitory speech or signing, resisting materialist approaches by its very nature. Writing, in the sense of graphic representations of language through artifacts of script, should therefore be an enticing angle from which to approach questions of language and materiality, where materiality is the culturally embedded significance of an object’s material qualities. Writing offers a premier example of an instance “in which language alone is inconceivable without explicit attention to the material” (see Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume). Why then has writing, as a concrete, visible, and manipulable form of language, not served as more of a bridge to the study of materiality and language? I argue here that closing the gap between the study of physical properties of texts and the study of the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which writing-as-language lives can help build this bridge. Doing so demands that we attend to materiality as more than a metaphor for the ability to act in the world; it demands that we see written artifacts as not merely as vehicles for the transmission of linguistic meaning or symbolic physical representations of speech (see e.g., Keane 2013) but that we also analyze them as the “material culture” of language. Before continuing on to a deeper discussion of the materialities of textual objects, I turn briefly to writing and the embodiment of language. Writing is a material practice of language not only because it creates enduring (if sometimes ephemeral) physical objects but also because, as explored throughout this book, it is produced by and produces embodied linguistic expression. Text production and decoding demand specific body postures, use of sensory organs, and training of muscle groups. These embodiments are at once socialized and subject to ideological processes: people writing and reading occupy space in meaningful ways (Zito 2014), and through their real and imagined actions, writers and readers embody ideologies of language (see, for example, Dickinson 2015; Jaffe 2003; Noy 2008). Like spoken or signed language, writing and its decoding (i.e., reading) are embodied phenomena formed and constrained by cultural practice, social norms, and language ideologies. Indeed, ideologies of “writeability” and “readability” of languages and texts can directly influence not only 265

266

Language and Materiality

the material features of writing as practiced (for example, through script choices and technologies of writing) but also perceptions of whether writing can be a suitably “complete” material representation of spoken or signed language (see, e.g., Chen 1994; Pine 2015; Hoffmann-Dilloway 2011). As in any study of materiality, familiarity can hinder an analytically complete description of culturally significant features of graphemes (font sets, letters, characters, glyphs). Fluent readers notice written language in the process of decoding it, immediately abstracting out linguistic meaning and moving quickly into the realms of cultural contextualization. Some physical features of the writing, perhaps script choice or color, may be noticed or, in the case of reading aloud, even “voiced” in this process of decoding, with some textual features carrying cues to the embodiment of read text as spoken language. Examples might range from the use of all caps to elicit an increase in volume (Lange 2015) or the choice of a “spooky” font to evoke corresponding speech tropes of supernatural language (e.g., creaky voice or erratic pitch changes in an American reader). However, even in the act of connecting these material features with culturally appropriate speech, the reader’s ability to see the text as an object with a multitude of culturally significant physical features (i.e., as material culture) fades before the task of “decoding” writing as language. It is in this sense that the concrete elements of the written text can become transparent to our analytical lens, when in fact they should form the foreground of our analysis. The physical properties of a text include material evidence of the technologies of its production, reproduction, circulation and reception (Dickinson 2015; Messick 1996; Noy 2008). Entwined with these technologies are features of the writing: the means of the formation of graphic elements; systematic features that Smith and Schmidt (1996) refer to as “paragraphemic” aspects, such as those defining particular scripts or fonts, proportions, size, and distribution of the text components; the spatial relation of components to one another and to their surroundings (Scollon and Scollon 2003); and the physical materials used to create the components and their effects (see, e.g., Zito 2014). This interrogation of the physical qualities of the text can also consider where one component of writing ends and another component, or even another text, begins. Although the physical aspects of the written medium are often “looked through” by both researchers and the communities in which written texts originate, circulate, and are consumed, all of these material components exist in relation to complex and overlapping interpretive practices that determine the contextual interpretation of that piece of writing as language. Rigorously analyzing these aspects of written language contributes to our understanding of how graphemes function as part of broader linguistic systems not only as relatively transparent symbols of “sounds” or “words” but also as complex, culturally engaged material elements, produced through embodied linguistic practices.

Physicality and Texts: Rematerializing the Transparent

267

A focus on the physical materiality of writing thus provides the groundwork for discussing the legibility (recognizability) of graphemes and other text components and the readability of the text (a measure of literacy skills, including knowledge of the script and writing system(s) used and understanding of the linguistic elements required to understand the text-as-language). These terms are often used in a culturally closed manner, for example when arguments for the “greater legibility” of Sans Serif fonts are deployed or when the readability of a text is evaluated primarily as a graded “reading level” needed to successfully decode it. To correct for this, here I add another term: the overall interpretability of an instance of writing as contextually situated language in material form. In this sense, interpretability expands the notions of both legibility and readability by contributing the semiotic “ground” – the cultural, linguistic, and ideological contexts that comprise the broader knowledge base that effectively limits the range of available linguistic interpretations of an instance of writing. In the remainder of this commentary, I briefly discuss orthography and script choice as founded in an exploration of interpretability and push for a more deliberate addition of the analysis of physicality of written language in these areas. Studies of orthography as situated social and cultural practice, such as those by Androutsopoulos (2000), Sebba (2007), and Jaffe (2003, 2009) draw our attention to ideologies of representation that shape the system of writing and to how these ideologies of systematic representation constrain the symbolic relationship between graphemes and spoken sound. Here, the primary focus is often on orthographies as material representations of the disciplining of linguistic form, the “licensing” (Sebba 2007) of variation, and the exploration of the limits of the connection between sound and grapheme through unlicensed variation. Studies of orthography converge to some degree with other work focusing on multilingual and multiscript writing by attending to how writing systems act as a centripetal force in language, wherein the production and decoding (reading) of written artifacts form the basis for shared, and even emergent, practice that defines community membership (see, e.g., Androutsopoulos 2000; Angermeyer 2005; Miller 2004). Thus work on unlicensed orthographic variation and the production of multiscript writing often shares a focus on the communitybased determination of readability as part of the interpretation of nonstandard texts; that is, the cultural knowledge of representational possibilities needed to correctly align the relationship between grapheme and sound in a particular cultural context. A focus on orthography and script choice as outlined here provides the groundwork for a study of materiality and language through writing systems. At the same time, much of the culturally informed work in this area seems to “look through” the material qualities of the writing produced, taking these to be a priori, and then focuses primarily on the social contexts motivating and

268

Language and Materiality

constraining text production and interpretation. An analysis of script choice, for example, may attend to some linguistic characteristics of multiscript writing, while ignoring “paragraphemic” questions of technologies of production or font choice across samples (but see Murphy, Chapter 4, this volume). The recognition of physical properties of texts allows for a stronger theorization of writing as a medium and as a material form of language. The increased concern for understanding meaning-in-context or, more broadly, the meaning of language within the social milieus that control its production and interpretation, has perhaps paradoxically led many sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists to overlook the physicality of scripts as it contributes to processes of meaning-making. Reengagement with materiality in written language demands that we focus on writing, not just as a phenomenon but also as a physical process and product, and texts, not only as social objects and signifiers of linguistic meaning but first and foremost as physical objects comprised of many elements that are all subject to cultural processes of meaning-making. A heightened awareness of the physicality of writing in turn allows us to approach instances of writing as standing in a material relationship to language, particularly spoken language, by interrogating how social, cultural, and ideological processes of conventionality, variability, style, and social differentiation contribute to their embodied production and interpretation. REFERENCES Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2000. “Non-standard spellings in media texts: The case of German fanzines.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(4): 514–533. Angermeyer, Philipp S. 2005. “Spelling bilingualism: Script choice in Russian American classified ads and signage.” Language in Society 34: 493–531. Chen, Ping. 1994. “Four projected functions of new writing systems for Chinese.” Anthropological Linguistics 36(3): 366–381. Dickinson, Jennifer. 2015. “Plastic letters: Alphabet mixing and ideologies of print in Ukrainian shop signs.” In Language Ideologies and Writing Systems, special issue of Pragmatics, edited by J. Dickinson 25 (4): 517–534. Hoffmann-Dilloway, Erika. 2011. “Writing the smile: Language ideologies in, and through, sign language scripts.” Language & Communication 31(4): 345–355. Jaffe, Alexandra. 2009. “Entextualization, mediatization, and authentication: Orthographic choice in media transcripts.” Text and Talk 29 (5): 571–594. 2003. “Misrecognition unmasked? “Polynomic” language, expert statuses and orthographic practices in Corsican schools.” Pragmatics 13(3/4): 515–538. Keane, Webb. 2013. “On spirit writing: Materialities of language and the religious work of transduction.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(1): 1–17. Lange, Patricia. 2015. “Typing your way to technical identity: Interpreting participatory ideologies online.” In Language Ideologies and Writing Systems, special issue of Pragmatics, edited by J. Dickinson 25 (4): 553–572. Messick, Brinkley. 1996. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Physicality and Texts: Rematerializing the Transparent

269

Miller, Laura. 2004. “Those naughty teenage girls: Japanese kogals, slang, and media assessments.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(2): 225–247. Noy, Chaim (2008) “Writing ideology: Hybrid symbols in a commemorative visitor book in Israel.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18.1: 62–81. Pine, Judith M.S. 2015. “Writing right: Language standardization and entextualization.” In Language Ideologies and Writing Systems, special issue of Pragmatics, edited by J. Dickinson 25 (4): 573–588. Scollon, Ron and Suzy Wong Scollon. 2003. Discourses in place: Language in the material world. New York: Routledge. Sebba, Mark. 2007. Spelling and society: The culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Janet S. and David Schmidt. 1996. “Variability in written Japanese: Towards a sociolinguistics of script choice.” Visible Language 30: 46–71. Zito, Angela. 2014. “Writing in water, or, evanescence, enchantment and ethnography in a Chinese urban park.” Visual Anthropology Review 30 (1): 11–22.

History, Artifacts, and the Language of Culture Change in Archaeology Mark W. Hauser

Beginning in the 1980s the concept of “creolization” began to seep its way into archaeological conversation. Leland Ferguson, an archaeologist examining the material remains from slave quarters in South Carolina, defined it as a “multicultural adjustment which entailed interaction, exchange, and creativity” (Ferguson 1992: xli). In some cases the term was used to describe a “problematic” process of language change that also allowed researchers to map human migration (McConvell 1990; Renfrew 1988; Sherratt 1988). In other cases, linguistic literature was appropriated as an explanatory model to describe the material dynamics of culture change in the context of asymmetrical social relations (see Armstrong 1985; Deagan 1983). In this chapter I explore the material effects of scholarship that took up creolization. This volume examines how a “linguistic approach to materiality can shed light on processes of meaning-making and value production” (Shankar and Cavanaugh, Chapter 1, this volume). Archaeologists employed creolization in describing culture change to make meaning of artifacts and landscape. While creolization has largely fallen out of favor in archaeological practice, its deployment prompts particular questions worth asking. In what ways do things, and the way we talk about them as scholars, shape particular populations? We can also flip this question around: how do we populate unknown places through things, language, and their combinatory potential? The relative merits and demerits of creolization have been discussed by archaeologists and cultural and linguistic anthropologists alike. For instance, in excavating domestic contexts associated with a Bahamian slave family, Laurie Wilkie (2000) argues that creolization can be used to explain why ceramics of largely European origin were assembled following African aesthetic practices in “African ways.” Wilkie explicitly draws on a grammar-based approach, in which the lexicon of the relatively powerful is adopted by the relatively powerless, while the grammar retains many features of a parent language. Conversely, others have argued that grammar-based creolization can elide past power dynamics that shape the archaeological record (Mullins and Paynter 2000) or that such models might not be the most appropriate ones to apply to material culture (Palmié 2006). These discussions rarely enter into the thorny subject of why creolization was adopted so readily. While it is beyond the scope 270

History, Artifacts, and the Language of Culture Change in Archaeology 271

of this chapter, certainly there is an intellectual history that links how a concept like creolization found its way into the everyday practice of archaeology, especially in examining archaeological contexts informed by colonial relations of power (e.g., slavery). Such analyses would have to include intellectual genealogies, the rise of area studies in postwar anthropological practice, and, in some cases, a grasping of terminology where none existed before. These are important contextual factors, but they do not explain why archaeologists were less reluctant to adopt creolization than other models, metaphors, or analyses. I propose that the material relations suggested by the concept as used in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics seem compelling for archaeological projects as well. Space For an archaeologist, materiality insists that humans exist in a world partially constituted of and by objects (Gosden and Marshall 1999; Joyce 2003; Mills and Walker 2008). Creolization, in contrast, can be vague. As Shannon Dawdy (2000) points out, it can be defined in three ways: as transplantation (see Deetz 1977), ethnicity, and the process of transculturation (Deagan 1983), or syncretism (Ferguson 1992). Although archaeologists view creolization as having a powerful ability to characterize emergent cultural forms, its lack of precision has made it particularly difficult to define. That being said, creolization seems particularly useful to analyze materials that archaeologists work with from highly stratified, multilingual societies (Groover 2000). However, the history and processes associated with settler colonization, the African diaspora, and slavery make it problematic to equate culture, biology, and language. After all, artifacts or the actions they might index “in themselves, ‘assert nothing,’” to paraphrase Webb Keane (2003: 419). They are ordered by a further convention. That is, archaeologists bring together assemblages of artifacts, features, and sometimes the assumptions of how these things represent human activities. Their composition changes over geographic space, and the use of artifacts might change between different social actors. The meaning of assemblages also changes over time or sometimes gets lost. Creolization is one of the few models open to explaining changes in the content of assemblages associated with different contexts and past social actors. Time Archaeologists also look to the affordances of objects and the substances they are made of (Knappett 2007; Salisbury 2012), and they read into creolization a potential way to explain why variation existed and how change took place. While some looked to underlying cultural grammars (Wheaton and

272

Language and Materiality

Garrow 1985), others sought out explanations with roots in class and labor relations (Ferguson 1999; Howson 1990). Drawing inspiration from Sidney Mintz’s and Richard Price’s Birth of African American Culture (1992), archaeologists have been quick to recognize how they could use the concept of creolization to interpret material culture and relations of power. Specifically, the observation that the relatively powerless adopt the lexicon of the relatively powerful transposes itself well to material culture in colonial contexts. Take, for example, the way that fragments of English ceramics and sherds of Dutch-made glass bottles were reworked into “gaming disks” or utilitarian scarpers and knives by indigenous and African populations throughout the colonial Americas. Some suggested that enslaved Africans drew on cultural repertoires learned in West Africa and applied them in new world contexts to unfamiliar materials. For example, broken glass bottles (Klingelhofer 1987; Wilkie 1996) were shaped into scrapers and broken pottery formed into gaming pieces for games like Wari. Others have challenged these interpretations, arguing that contexts of inequality required colonized subjects to improvise necessary utensils of everyday life (MacGuire 1991; Mullins and Paynter 2000). Absence Archaeologists and anthropologists have also noted the particular immateriality of materiality (Ingold 2007). Thinking through creolization with language and artifacts, both insist on the analytical potential of absence. To truly document creolization, both language and artifacts are necessary elements in a larger assemblage (Dawdy 2000): analysis including only one or the other is insufficient. Creolization assumes a social context in which particular languages are spoken in spaces that render them invisible to the relatively powerful. Similarly, the stuff of the powerful tends to be overrepresented in the archaeological records of past communities. These relations are not independent but linked in important ways. To say that objects present or used during language performance changed the content of meaning is hardly new. Similarly, that language spoken during the repetition of gestures of everyday life also imbues objects with new trajectories is an old trope. What is new is the actors involved. Where many archaeologists assumed interaction between only two cultures, creolization has the potential to account for multiethnic communities in which gender, faction, or class shape the contours of everyday life (Groover 2000: 102). Take the example of a class of artifact identified by archaeologists as colonoware. To be clear, the term “colonoware” is an archaeological convention to classify a body of ceramic materials made in the Americas using techniques attributed to Native Americans or people of African descent. The entangled lives of indigenous populations and settlers (forced or otherwise) following

History, Artifacts, and the Language of Culture Change in Archaeology 273

colonization have proven to be a fertile ground for conversation in Oceania (Clarke and Torrence 2000), Australia (Murray 2004; Paterson 2008; Lydon 2009); the northeast United States (see Rubertone 2002; Silliman 2009, 2010; Jordan 2008); California (Lightfoot 2005; Voss 2008), and the southeast United States. In such contexts where superficial renderings of material culture might belie the material and intellectual contributions of indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, creolization provided an approach to think about how objects were used or transformed in novel ways. Colonoware, as one of the few items that was made, traded. and used by these past actors, has therefore provided a fertile ground for making alternative histories. While each region has taken on its more specific debates and colonial matters to be disentangled, it is interesting to note that in the Southeast, where we might see the strongest parallels to the Caribbean, the debate about the origins of “colono” potters – a larger discussion initiated by Fairbanks (1962), Noël Hume (1962), South (1974), and Binford (1962) – addressed the degree to which the pottery could speak to such entanglements. Not always, but sometimes, these wares can be a physical, embodied attitude of the particular knowledges peoples brought with them and their ability to adapt to new conditions. As Leland Ferguson (1992: 22) suggests, scholars focus on this class of ceramics because of the implicit and “complex processes of colonial creolization: [where] demography and culture varied from place to place.” They are, in effect, an “intercultural artifact” (Singleton and Bograd 2000). In a sense, Ferguson, as well as Singleton and Bograd, argue that we need to simultaneously examine the routes of the people responsible for making and using the pottery (oceanic), and the roots of its production and use in situated contexts (Orser 1996). These pots are as oceanic in scope as European industrially produced ceramics. At the same time, their meaning and use are highly contextual. These ideas are what Ferguson refers to as the “Colono ware concept” (Ferguson 1992: 22). The question is how far do we extend this concept in time and space? Because creolization, and colonoware as a material extension, can imply transplantation, ethnicity, or hybridization, it has the ability to make flat a very uneven topography of colonial relations in the early modern world. For the most part we have little knowledge of what people called the pots themselves or the values they ascribed to them. As such, this one class of artifact has been the focus of a three-decade-long debate (see Hauser and DeCorse 2003). For archaeologists, the materiality of language regulates whether the question, “what did people call this pot,” is worth asking. Mapping of the social relations surrounding how people name pots reveals the linkage between history and culture, power and objects, inference and interest. Yet such insights are only available through the presence of fragmentary documents and the dissonance those documents create in relation to a pot recovered from a kitchen of a slave.

274

Language and Materiality

Concluding Thoughts Materiality studies insist that assemblages evoke particular questions whose answer is not predictable; the same can be said of language practices. In his commentary on the 2005 volume Materiality, Chris Pinney invoked what he referred to as the Ginzburg problem; that is, the intellectual habit to “find evidence in the visual that in fact we have discovered elsewhere” (Pinney 2005: 260). To what extent does a focus on materiality and language help us discern the questions, influences, and inferences to which a prototype, author, and recipient in a particular problem-space responded? This question should be equally applicable to both the past and the present. Additionally, how do objects when considered alongside linguistic practices such as naming continue to prompt questions, influences, and inferences in new combinations of events and enable archaeologists to determine whether questions are worth asking? The appropriation of creolization by archaeology has been the subject of critique. Stephan Palmié, for example, argued that its use was uncritical and poorly understood (Palmié 2006). This is probably the case, but to a certain extent this critique also misses the point. The word “creolization” had a particular materiality for archaeologists, which can be borne out by some of the questions it generated. Linguistic creolization had a particular impact on archaeological practice. It helped archaeologists imagine, if not analyze, a less static understanding of social, political, and economic boundaries that shaped the colonial past. Importantly, it is fair to say that many archaeologists were concerned with creolization as they thought through the materiality of past objects and their roles in shaping the life-worlds of past actors. REFERENCES Armstrong, Douglas V. 1985. An Afro-Jamaican Slave Settlement: Archaeological Investigations at Drax Hall. In The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, edited by T. A. Singleton, 261–290. New York: Academic Press. Binford, Lewis. 1962. “Colonial Period Ceramics of Nooaway and Weanac Indians of Southeastern Virginia.” Quarterly Bulletin, Archaeological Society of Virginia 19 (4). Clarke, Anne, and Robin Torrence. 2003. The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania. London: Routledge. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2000 “Understanding Cultural Change through the Vernacular: Creolization in Louisiana.” Historical Archaeology:107–123. Deagan, Kathleen A., ed. 1983. Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. New York: Academic Press. Deetz, James. 1995 [1977]. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Everyday Life in Early America. New York: Anchor Books. Fairbanks, Charles H. 1962. “Colono-Indian Ware Milk Pitcher.” Florida Anthropologist 15(4):103–106.

History, Artifacts, and the Language of Culture Change in Archaeology 275 Ferguson, Leland. 1992. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Colonial AfricanAmerica. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1999 ““The Cross Is A Magic Sign”: Marks on Eighteenth-Century Bowls from South Carolina.” In I, too, am America”: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, edited by T. Singleton, 116–131. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press. Gosden, Chris and Yvonne Marshall. 1999. “The Cultural Biography of Objects.” World Archaeology 31(2):169–178. Groover, Mark D. 2000. “Creolization and the Archaeology of Multiethnic Households in the American South.” Historical Archaeology 34(3): 99–106. Hauser, Mark W. and Christopher R. DeCorse. 2003. “Low-Fired Earthenwares in the African Diaspora: Problems and Prospects.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 7(1):67–98. Howson, Jean E. 1990. “Social Relations and Material Culture: A Critique of the Archaeology of Plantation Slavery.” Historical Archaeology 24(4):78–91. Ingold, Tim. 2007. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14(01):1– 16. Jordan, K. A. 2008. The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754: An Iroquois Local Political Economy. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. Joyce, Rosemary A. 2003. “Making Something of Herself: Embodiment in Life and Death at Playa de los Muertos, Honduras.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13(02):248–261. Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language & Communication 23(3):409–425. Klingelhofer, Eric. 1987. “Aspects of Early Afro-American Material Culture: Artifacts from the Slave Quarters at Garrison Plantation, Maryland.” Historical Archaeology 21(02): 112–119. Knappett, Carl. 2007. “Materials with Materiality?” Archaeological Dialogues 14(01):20–23. Lightfoot, K.G. 2005. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lydon, J. 2009. Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission. Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira. MacGuire, Randall H., ed. 1991. The Archaeology of Inequality. Oxford: Blackwell. McConvell, Patrick. 1990. “The Linguistic Prehistory of Australia: Opportunities for Dialogue with Archaeology.” Australian Archaeology (31):3–27. Mills, Barbara J and William H. Walker 2008. “Introduction: Memory, Materiality, and Depositional Practice.” In Memory Work: Archaeologies of Material Practices, edited by B. J. Mills and W. H. Walker, 3–23. Santa Fe: School for American Research. Mintz, Sidney W. and Richard Price. 1992. The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Approach. Boston: Beacon. Mullins, Paul R. and Robert Paynter. 2000. “Representing Colonizers: An Archaeology of Creolization, Ethnogenesis, and Indigenous Material Culture among the Haida.” Historical Archaeology 34(03): 73–84. Murray, T. 2004. The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

276

Language and Materiality

Noël Hume, Ivor. 1962. “An Indian Ware of the Colonial Period.” Quarterly Bulletin, Archaeological Society of Virginia 17 (1). Orser, Charles E. 1996. A Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. New York: Springer. Palmié, Stephan. 2006. “Creolization and Its Discontents.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35(1):433–456. Paterson, A. 2008. The Lost Legions: Culture Contact in Colonial Australia. Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira. Pinney, Christopher. 2005. “Things Happen: or, from Which Moment Does That Object Come?” In Materiality, edited by D. Miller, 256–272. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Renfrew, Colin. 1988. “Archaeology and Language.” Current Anthropology 29(3):437– 468. Rubertone, P.E. 2000. “The Historical Archaeology of Native Americans.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29(1):425–446. Salisbury, Roderick B. 2012. “Engaging with Soil, Past and Present.” Journal of Material Culture 17(1):23–41. Sherratt, Susan. 1988. “The Archaeology of Indo-European: An Alternative View.” Antiquity 62(236):584–595. Silliman, Stephen W. 2009. “Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England.” American Antiquity 211–230. 2010. “Indigenous Traces in Colonial Spaces: Archaeologies of Ambiguity, Origin, and Practice.” Journal of Social Archaeology 10(1):28–58. Singleton, T. A. and M. Bograd. 2000. “Looking for the Colono in Colonoware.” In Lines that Divide: Historical, Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender, edited by James Delle et al., 2–21. Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press. South, S. 1974. Palmetto Parapets: Exploratory Archeology at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, 38CH50. Voss, Barbara L. 2008. The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wheaton, Thomas R. and Patrick H. Garrow. 1985. “Acculturation and the Archaeological Record in the Carolina Lowcountry.” In The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, edited by Theresa Singleton, 239–269. New York: Academic Press. Wilkie, Laurie A. 1996. “Glass-Knapping at a Louisiana Plantation: African-American Tools?” Historical Archaeology 30(4): 37–49. 2000. Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840–1950. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language? Dualisms and Embodiments∗ Judith T. Irvine Language and Materiality: does this wording of the volume’s title imply that the two topics are clearly separate, like neighbors looking over a fence? Will any discussion of relations between them concern realms that are in some way conceived as autonomous? For many scholars, that may be the default assumption. Yet, for the present volume, the intention expressed in the introduction is to consider materiality studies with a focus on language – an intention that implies a more nuanced connection. The challenge, then, is how to think and write about this connection without reproducing the presupposed dualism that has made these topics seem to be quite separate. I do not think it is possible to eradicate that dualism from scholarly consciousness, even if it were deemed desirable to do so; however, its inadequacies need to be noticed, and approaches need to be contemplated that might help us when considering ethnographic cases in which there is no such opposition – or perhaps a differently imagined opposition – between language and materiality. The default assumption has a long history. We can read it in Ferdinand de Saussure’s famous antinomy contrasting langue and parole, where langue – the domain of structure and system – is entirely a mental construct, while all the ways in which language enters into the world in acts of speaking are left to parole. We can also go further back in history, for example, to John Locke’s idealization of language as belonging properly to the realm of ideas in the mind, and not directly to the realm of things in the world, the things that words can represent (see Bauman and Briggs 2003). Following that intellectual thread, in which the most important aspects of language are deemed located in the mind, we might also go back to other dualisms, such as the Cartesian opposition of mind and body, or even to earlier philosophies that contrast intellectual faculties (variously linking reason and faith) with bodily passions. The questions for our present purposes are these. Where, in the many binaries and dualisms that are to be found in the history of philosophy in the Western world, is language positioned? What is understood by “language,” and what aspects of language are focused on? Science fiction aside, nobody would deny ∗

Thanks are due to Krisztina Feherváry for comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

277

278

Language and Materiality

that speaking, listening, writing, and reading require a physical body, one way or another. So those scholars who would locate language most crucially in the mind – conceiving of mind as an immaterial entity opposed to physicality – are reproducing the contrast between the linguistic and the material within language itself. Moreover, to locate language in the mind raises questions about other minds: questions about individuals and social relations and how language can transcend the mental “black box.” In what follows, I pursue the historical questions a little further, insofar as dualisms and attempts to overcome or reconcile them have informed scholarly work on language and in linguistic anthropology. I then turn to some aspects of linguistic practice whose engagement in a world of sensory experience, physical activity, and concrete “stuff” is relatively easy to see (even though often ignored in highly mentalist visions of language). A third section explores some ethnographic cases where monistic approaches appear to prevail. Finally, it is necessary to return to the core concepts, “language” and “materiality,” because ultimately, one cannot navigate among the many questions raised by the relationship between them without some consideration of what we mean by them. At issue is not so much whether one can arrive at tidy definitions, much less at separate ones. Instead, it is whether materiality is construed as sufficiently capacious to include language – all of language or only some aspects of it – and what might be left over. A Bit More History: From Locke to Peirce In their discussion of Locke and his intellectual heirs, Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (2003) pick up on Bruno Latour’s (1993) arguments about the intellectual moves underlying “modernity” to consider the “work of purification” that Locke found necessary if language – at least, language as a tool and vehicle of modernity – was to be cleansed of its messy social indexicalities and variations. Here, Bauman and Briggs are concerned with the intellectual genealogies, descending from Locke, that distinguish science (as universalistic knowledge and truth) from society (as disorder, variability, and uncertainty). The discussion then focuses on the moves that render language autonomous – outside the world it denotes – the better to represent it truthfully. Only when it is separated from both society and the material world, the Lockean tradition supposes, can language become the tool for achieving truthful knowledge (referring accurately to the world or to society) and reliable reasoning. A purification that places language firmly in mind, removing it from materiality so that it can better refer thereto, only becomes “safe for science” (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 19) if language is purified of the detrimental aspects of society as well. Similar purifications preoccupied the Protestant sect(s) whose missionary projects Webb Keane (2007) describes in Christian Moderns, his study of the

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language?

279

encounter between Dutch Calvinist missionaries and their Sumbanese interlocutors in colonial Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). While the missionaries’ Calvinist roots made for some similarities between their philosophies and Locke’s – similarities common to the Protestant sects that broke from Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – their rejection of materiality in religious language and religious activity went especially far. For the Calvinists, purification was inspired by religious purposes: to enhance language’s capacity for conveying immaterial meanings, so that it might better mediate between the material world and the realm of the divine (ibid.: 66). As Keane writes (ibid.: 67), “the purification of language for religion could reinforce the separation of material objects from the world of meanings and of agents.” Only through invisible divine influence could language have any spiritual effect; the human voice and the linguistic forms humans employ were otherwise empty or, worse, wicked (ibid.: 62–63; I return to Keane’s work later). Yet, just as Latour pairs the work of purification with the “work of mediation” that produces hybrids between the purified realms, so we can find various hybrids between a purified, dichotomized language and materiality. Noam Chomsky’s construct, the “mind/brain,” is one example;1 this hybrid of language and bodily materiality is conceived in terms of the neurology of the biological individual, thus focusing materiality on neurology, and, in language, focusing mainly on syntax and semantics. Another example of a hybrid, of roughly the same vintage as Chomsky’s, might be Charles Hockett’s (1985) paper on “F.” Introducing his paper as an exercise in four-field anthropology, crossing the usual boundaries between linguistic inquiry and research in biology and archaeology – thus methodologically and conceptually hybrid – Hockett argued that a language’s sound system is influenced by the agricultural practices and eating habits of its speakers because of the effects of increased consumption of cereal foods on the teeth.2 In a hybrid construction from a century earlier, some authors interpreted language differences in terms of race, an interpretation that required them to consider how, more specifically, that connection might work. Consequently, they debated about which part of the body, or which kinds of physical disposition or practice, might be most significant as predictor of race-cum-language classification: hair form; pelvis; mouth; mentality and “indolence,” perhaps climate-induced; or something else. See, for example, K. R. Lepsius’s 1880 discussion of Friedrich Müller’s classification of the world’s language families as subsets of racial categories defined by the form of the hair. Lepsius proposed that one might prefer the skeleton, especially the pelvis. More influential in the long run was the work of Johann Gottfried Herder and his followers, an intellectual strand that Bauman and Briggs identify as a sort of “hybrid modernity”: hybrid in bringing in tradition, Volk, and particularity into a picture of (national) public discourse, yet “modern” in requiring standardization and uniformity if authentic knowledge is to be realized. The

280

Language and Materiality

Herderian view of language is not universalistic: each Volk has its own special approach to the world. But the requisite standardization recalls Locke’s effort to clear messy class- or gender-linked social variation away from the language of science. Hybrids presuppose separations. They do not undo the work of purification; instead, they build from it. Moreover, some of the particular hybrids I have just mentioned inspired renewed efforts at separation. Countering racism in accounts of language differences at the turn of the twentieth century, Franz Boas and, soon after, Edward Sapir vigorously asserted a mentalistic view. Linguistic phenomena were unconscious processes of the mind, wrote Boas (1911 [1966]: 63) – even phonetic phenomena, Sapir asserted (1925 [1949]: 45), “are not physical phenomena per se.” Instead, Sapir continued, the analyst of language must recognize “the necessity of getting behind the sense data of any type of expression in order to grasp the intuitively felt and communicated forms which alone give significance to such expression.” Phonological patterning was psychologically real and could not be reduced to “simple physical processes” (Sapir 1933 [1949]: 47). Certainly one would not wish to return to racist interpretations. Is there a way out of, or beyond, dichotomization? Is there, or can there be, an approach to language within materiality studies – treating it as part of materiality studies, rather than mediating or hybridizing matter and spirit or matter and mentality? As the introduction to this volume indicates, there are many works in contemporary linguistic anthropology that approach pieces of the problem: placing language in political economy, attending to social indexicalities and the contexts of language in interaction, tracking graphic artifacts, objectifying bits of discourse or linguistic form, tracing circulations and observing the technical effects of new media, and so on. Clearly, these works situate language, or some aspect of it, in some aspect of a world of material things, bodies, substances, and social relations – in short, a material world. Does this mean, however, that the dichotomy has been dissolved, or has it only been bridged? Nakassis (2013: 400) suggests that contemporary linguistic anthropologists have asserted a monism in their theoretical statements that they do not live up to in their actual analyses, which persist in reinscribing the dichotomy. “What is disavowed in theory returns in method and analysis,” he maintains. Keane, seeking to step back from the divisions in which his Calvinist missionaries were so invested and to highlight those divisions’ ideological character, proposed “semiotic ideology” as the framing concept that would allow him to discuss the missionaries’ projects in the context of their encounter with Sumbanese, whom they considered “fetishistic” or “materialistic.” “Semiotic ideology,” understood as broader, more encompassing than “language ideology,” was envisioned to permit analytical attention to materialities and to “other semiotic domains” than language – to words and things, not just words. Yet, this argument does not easily escape ideologies that locate language outside a

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language?

281

material world, as Keane (2007: 18) evidently recognized when he wrote that “the very distinction between what counts as language and what does not is itself constructed ideologically, and it differs across historical and social contexts . . . It is a matter of semiotic ideology whether speakers even consider words to be radically distinct from things in the first place.” Conceivably one could make “language ideology” the umbrella concept, allowing it to include ideologies that restrict “language” to a mentalistic langue, as well as ideologies that locate language within materiality. However, to do so – to ignore how ingrained is the narrower understanding of “language” – would probably be to swim against too strong a tide. Keane has excellent reason to propose a different term, and we have good reason to follow along. Still, a new term does not necessarily make old dichotomies go away. In notions such as “other semiotic domains” (i.e., other than language) it looks as if the dichotomizing opposition of language and materiality – the assumed relegation of language to the mentalistic realm – is still in place. A frequent allusion to “words and things,” however convenient, might reinforce that default opposition (see Miller, Chapter 3, and Thurlow and Jaworski, Chapter 10, this volume, for examples of work that brings words and things together in various ways). The opposition is not problematic for the discussion of Calvinist missionaries who subscribed to it, but one may wish to discuss philosophies that do not. Nevertheless, there is much in favor of a broad conception such as Keane’s, which looks to semiotics and refers the reader to the work of C. S. Peirce. Pursuing that recommendation and exploring a Peircean approach, one will find that one or another aspect of language fits everywhere in Peirce’s scheme, from qualisigns to arguments.3 Qualisigns, for example – qualities taken to be signs – would include loudness, something as easily taken to be a sign (perhaps, when embodied as loudness of vocalization, a sign of a speaker’s deafness or aggressiveness) as some phenomenon not usually considered linguistic, such as redness. Peirce wanted to keep his semiotics grounded in a material world, and indeed examples that are linguistic and examples from “other semiotic domains” all fit throughout the scheme. This is crucial, because in his framework there is no basic sign-relation that is exclusively linguistic nor any from which language is excluded. While it is certainly possible – and for some purposes desirable – to focus on some aspect of linguistic practice and analyze it only in terms of its cognitive organization and its internal systematicity (witness the successes of disciplinary linguistics), Peirce’s approach helps show that doing so neither captures all that language is nor the ways it is part of, rather than parallel to, materiality. Speaking and Writing as Material Practices Let us turn now to some linguistic practices – speaking and writing – and consider them just in terms of their material qualities: how they are physically

282

Language and Materiality

produced and apprehended, what material objects they produce, and what can be their characteristic durations and effects. Speaking is a physical activity of the body, requiring manipulation of airflow, the vocal cords, and the rest of the articulatory apparatus, as well as positioning of the body relative to interlocutors and other aspects of a physical setting. So too is listening: are you leaning in? How close are you to the body of the speaker – do you feel (or smell) the speaker’s breath? Are you touched by gestures, or do you feel some air movement they create? Are you looking at the speaker’s face or at something else? Are the acoustics of the speech sound, when the air (or wire or electronic signal) carries it, such that you can detect and process them? Steven Feld’s Chapter 7 in this volume takes up these types of questions in regard to singing and talking bodies and the horns Por Por drivers use to express themselves in various ways. Writing is multiply engaged in materiality, because it too is a physical activity of the body, requiring implements and surfaces and usually resulting in some graphic artifact that embodies a text. In regard to the physical activity of writing, recall the penmanship pedagogy that was so prominent a part of young people’s education in the decades before widespread personal computers and smartphones. One was supposed to hold the pen in a certain way, to sit with proper posture (a sign of moral discipline, not only an instrumentality), and to move one’s hand and arm in such a way as to produce well-formed letters. My own sixth-grade teacher was fanatical on the subject of proper handwriting. To train us in the proper way to make a cursive capital “B,” for example, he had us stand, holding up the right hand, and wave the hand in the air while reciting, “Up, down, around, loop, finish!”4 Many scholars of literacy have focused on certain kinds of comparisons between speaking and writing; for example, considering their relative durability, accuracy of transmission (related to durability), or ease of decontextualization and objectivity. Bodily practice does not loom large in those comparisons. Regarding durability, the usual claim is that writing makes a bit of discourse more durable, while speaking is taken to be ephemeral, vanishing as soon as the air stops vibrating. The point is well taken in some respects. Clay tablets bearing cuneiform records certainly outlasted anyone’s memory of what the tablets said, so much so that when the tablets were examined in recent eras, millennia after they were produced, the writing had to be decoded and the texts reconstructed. But the contrast with speaking can easily be exaggerated, if it assumes that writing is always placed on durable surfaces and if one ignores the role of memory in oral transmission. In my Senegalese fieldwork I used to know a local performer of oral traditions who once showed me a crumbling scrap of paper on which he had written the names of some ancestors of a family whose genealogy he regularly recited. In locales where mice and termites threaten paper, or where humidity renders writing illegible, written records may be far less durable than human memory and a carefully maintained oral tradition.5

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language?

283

How well writing contributes to the long-term preservation of discourse thus depends on these kinds of local circumstances. It also depends on the physical nature of the writing materials, including, today, the software and machinery available to access an electronic text. Moreover, it depends on the practices by which a written text is transmitted and archived. In the past couple of decades, an increasing number of scholars have paid attention to questions about how the data of historical knowledge have been produced, organized, and preserved.6 Although questions about the durability of records have often been the province of historians, the ways people take up – or fail to take up – products of linguistic activity, be they spoken or written, are as much a concern for anthropology and sociology, because they pertain to the role those products play in social life. How do newspapers (for example) circulate, and what do people do with them – read them (silently or aloud?), preserve selected issues, donate them to neighbors, throw them into the trash, cut them up and use them for toilet tissue? Similar questions about circulation and uptake can be asked about spoken utterances. Is a particular utterance ignored, repeated, or responded to? As the introduction to this volume mentions, works in linguistic anthropology on entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990, Silverstein and Urban 1996) and on interdiscursivity (Agha and Wortham 2005) have explored the ways in which stretches of spoken discourse can take on a long life, becoming treated as textual objects distinct from their original conditions of production, and influencing – through repetitions, allusions, and responses – subsequent occasions of social activity, even many years later. The linguistic form of the discourse, including such material aspects as the patterning of its sounds – its poetics, that is – plays an important part in potentiating this process. Linguists, recognizing that written texts have their own conventions and registers, generally consider spoken language as the proper domain of analysis. This is not because of anything to do with speaking as an activity, but because spoken language is taken to give better access to langue, to language’s systematicity and its cognitive properties. For that purpose, linguists argue, as Sapir did decades ago, that it is not really the physical utterance that matters. Apart from phoneticians, many recent linguists downplay the physical utterance even more than their pre-Chomskyan forebears did. Instead of looking for regularities in the forms of uttered speech and deducing cognitive systematicities therefrom, these contemporary linguists work to capture the speaker’s intuitions of linguistic form, as found in judgments of grammaticality of bits of discourse the linguist presents to them. Such intuitions enable analysis to rely on acceptability judgments and to disregard utterances made with mouthfuls of potatoes, or sentences left incomplete or distorted because of sudden contingencies. (Perhaps the speaker broke off what s/he was saying when the building exploded). Valuable as it is for identifying language’s formal patterning, this reliance on intuitions – often the linguist’s own – is surely a version of the work of purification.

284

Language and Materiality

As such it has often tended toward the same kinds of erasures of socially grounded variation and pragmatics that we saw in the works of Locke et al., centuries earlier. In linguistics departments, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, while recognized fields, are rarely considered to offer core theory. Arguably then, and ironically, despite linguists’ often asserted emphasis on spoken language, the linguistic standardization and decontextualization characteristic of written texts has become the implicit model for data suited to linguistic analysis (other than of phonetics).7 Meanwhile, for many scholars who do concern themselves with written texts, writing is largely identified with its product, the texts contained in text-artifacts (but see Dickinson, and Murphy, Chapter 4, this volume, on the graphic dimensions of text and writing). To the extent that the process of producing such texts is an object of scholarly attention, it is primarily the cognitive process that is of concern: the process of organizing one’s ideas and expressing them according to the conventions of a standardized langue.8 Much of this scholarship is oriented to improving writing pedagogy. Unlike the concerns of my sixth-grade teacher decades ago, this is a pedagogy focusing on the appropriate organization of cognitive representations, certainly not the physical activity of writing – or speaking, for that matter. The binary opposition of mind and body prevails. Some Ethnographic Explorations Suppose now that we wish to explore some ethnographic cases in which a prevailing ideology of language does not fit Euro-American frameworks. These cases do not exhibit the same default assumptions about language and materiality, but have their own patterns of linguistic practice regarding both speaking and writing, and the people concerned have their own ways of understanding the implications of these practices. Analytical frameworks based on the default opposition of language and materiality risk missing or downplaying practices that do not fit. As a glance in the direction of such exploration I briefly outline some relevant points from my early fieldwork among rural Wolof in Senegal, mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, and append a few comments on Zulu (from archives, ethnographic literature, and fieldwork in 2012 and 2014). To be sure, my own research is certainly not the only source of useful examples, as we see in some illustrative passages from Malinowski’s well-known ethnographic fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands. For the Wolof people I worked with in a rural Senegalese village, speaking was a practice that – like most other aspects of social life – took place in a context of traditions of social inequality. The most relevant form of inequality was the system of social categorization identified in the literature on the region in terms of caste.9 Behavior deemed characteristic of persons of different social ranks was explained ascriptively, with reference to birth, genealogy,

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language?

285

and sometimes early childhood experience, all relatable to bodily difference and bodily practice. Speaking, and the manner in which a person does it, was part of this account, which contrasted high and low ranks and – with regard to speaking styles – focused especially on the gewel, a low-ranking social category (a type of griot, to cite the French term that has become generally used in writings on West Africa). The griots’ occupational specializations involved communication and, especially, oral performance. I have described these Wolof speech styles and their cultural/ideological background elsewhere (see, e.g., Irvine 1990, 2011, and other works), and I do not repeat the analysis here. Suffice it to say that the differentiation of styles of speaking was locally understood in terms of bodily processes that made some people (griots, especially) temperamentally excitable and active, and other people (of higher rank) stolid and laconic. Although these differences showed up in styles of speaking conventionally associated with ranked social categories, they pertained much more generally to physical and moral conduct. Since speaking itself involves the manipulation of air, its shaping in the body, and the production of sound, then (according to the local theory) the sounds and breath of a speaker impinge on interlocutors along with everything else about an utterance. And if bodies are understood as variously composed of the basic elements – earth, air, fire, and water – the effects of bodily activities could be interpreted in terms of those elements, their balance, and their interaction. Consequently, when a griot addressed a high-ranking noble the effect (I was told) was to stir the noble to action, just as the wind acts on embers to produce a livelier flame. Moreover, languages themselves could be identified with parts of the body in which they resided: Wolof and English in the belly, French in the face and nose. These comments about the bodily location of Wolof, English, and French languages were explained to me in terms partly physiological (the presence of nasal vowels in French and their absence in Wolof and English and normative pitch, deemed high in French and low in Wolof and English) and partly psychological (sincerity, which my village consultants considered greater in speakers of Wolof and English than in speakers of French). Clearly, this intellectual tradition does not work to separate language from the material world. Writing, like speaking, was also seen as a physical activity, but it could be embodied in other ways too. The forms of writing that are historically of long standing in this part of Africa are in Arabic script and are learned in Qur’an school along with memorizing the verses of the Qur’an that are written down. Each pupil has a wooden board on which he or she learns to write the verse, which is then memorized and is said to become part of the person. Ideally a fully educated person does not need a written copy of the Qur’an, because it has been memorized, internalized; such a person is a “walking Quran,” as Rudolph Ware (2014) has described. The bodily connection goes further too. Verses of

286

Language and Materiality

the Qur’an, written on small pieces of paper folded up and sewn inside little leather pouches, are worn on the body to protect from harm. Meanwhile, the special ink in which a Qur’anic verse is written is washed off the wooden boards and used, afterward, as a body wash – or it is drunk. This is embodiment indeed. (It does not apply to writing of other kinds – of secular texts and Roman script, such as are learned in the state schools and are considered something quite different.) Of course, these points about embodiment in Wolof linguistic practice do not mean that Wolof has no linguistic systematicity or that its signs are not iterable. They do mean, however, that embodiment and pragmatics were locally taken to pervade communication in all its forms. The pragmatic effect of speaking differed, in this view, according to the nature of the interlocutors: the kind of person who was speaking and the speaker’s motive in doing so, as well as the kinds of persons who heard the utterances. Styles and registers of speaking differed correspondingly. The differences involved prosody most conspicuously, but also all other aspects of linguistic form, as well as physical stance and gesture, the position of the face, and degree of openness of the mouth. Wolof linguistic signs are iterable, but not all of them are utterable by all speakers. And in some circumstances – on certain public occasions where people of many ranks are present – interpretability too begins to contract. Griots sometimes spoke so rapidly and/or employed such esoteric vocabulary that people of other social categories could not follow them. Meanwhile persons of very high rank either whispered or remained entirely silent. So they were not producing broadly interpretable referential content either. Ideas about the embodiment of language and knowledge and about the material efficacy of speech are hardly unique to Wolof villagers. Ware (2014) discusses Islamic settings and education more broadly, arguing that ideas about the embodiment of Qur’anic knowledge have been important in Islam for many centuries. Yet, such ideas are not confined to Islamic contexts. My guess is that they are likely more common than not, in non-Western cultural traditions. In an ongoing project, Liz Gunner and I are exploring some similar ideas that are attested for Zulu, historically (in archives of a century ago) and, to some extent, in our own ethnography.10 An example would concern the pragmatic effect of uttering a person’s birth name, one of the many names an individual bears and the one that identifies him or her most personally. Depending on the relationship between the speaker and the person named (“called out”), the act of uttering the name – even unintentionally – can physically endanger its bearer. So grave is that danger, as well as the potential backlash on the speaker, that a woman taking her sick baby to a clinic may be unwilling to utter the baby’s name when the clinic staff ask for it for their records. The problem is most acute if the baby’s name is similar to that of the woman’s father-in-law, someone she must avoid addressing. One woman told us that she avoided the difficulty by writing the

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language?

287

baby’s name rather than uttering it. The physical utterance was the problem, not the information as such. Turning to an anthropological classic, similar ideas about language’s participation in a material world must surely underlie the linguistic work of “magic” among Trobriand Islanders, as described in Malinowski’s ethnography. In a passage detailing the activities of the Trobriand specialist in garden magic, for example, Malinowski (1935: 216), wrote, During the numerous rites of growth magic the [specialist’s] voice is made to sweep the soil of each plot and thus to reach the tubers underground, the growing vine and its developing foliage . . . In every act the magician’s breath is regarded as the medium by which the magical force is carried. The voice – and let us remember it must be the voice of the accredited and fully instructed magician, and that his voice must correctly utter the words of an absolutely authentic spell – ‘generates’ the power of the magic.

And here as well (Malinowski 1961 [1922]: 409): “Magic rests in the belly . . . The force of magic, crystallised in the magical formulae, is carried by men of the present generation in their bodies. They are the depositories of this most valuable legacy of the past. The force of magic does not reside in the things; it resides within man and can escape only through his voice.” As has often been noted, a virtue of Malinowski’s ethnography is that he provided enough detail that readers could arrive at their own interpretations of the evidence. In this instance, it seems the Trobrianders of Malinowski’s day did not share in a dualistic outlook that would oppose language to materiality. In the matter at hand, that dualism would entail opposing physically efficacious speech (“magic” spells) to everyday speech. Whether Malinowski himself would have accepted a fully nondualistic interpretation is not clear to me. At times he seems to place great stress on the difference between the language of magic and that of everyday life, as when he writes of the “coefficient of weirdness” in the language of magic (Malinowski 1935). Yet, while Trobrianders evidently had a range of formulas and poetic genres – texts that were carefully memorized and uttered over gardens or over gifts of betel to potential partners in kula exchanges – any contrasts they may have seen in the efficacy of utterances do not seem to have coincided with a great divide between language and materiality. If there were binaries, the lines were differently drawn. Looking for relevant information in published ethnographies, even Malinowski’s, raises a number of questions. When might the ethnographer’s own presuppositions and language, with terms like “magic,” make it difficult to see or to write about nondualistic philosophies? How, in exploring philosophical systems that have not (or not yet) enjoyed vast literatures or armies of scholars studying them, does one distinguish between nondualistic philosophies and hybrids? And, how does one distinguish between utterances that are deemed materially efficacious because there is no notion that utterances might not be,

288

Language and Materiality

and those that are materially efficacious precisely because they are extraordinary – radically separate from everyday social life and activity – separations such as some religious ritual might establish or sacred text reveal? Might religious language be the right place to look to address that problem? Or might it be just the wrong place, unless one also looks equally hard at a range of other linguistic forms and settings? These problems are really just part of the much-discussed broader issue of translation in cases of major cultural difference, although the relationship between language and materiality – and the role of linguistic phenomena in materiality – has not always been at the forefront of the discussion. In any case, what is most important is that the ethnographer should be able to imagine and address cultural philosophies that differ from the Western dualistic tradition in how they organize relations between language (or aspects of language) and a material world, whatever the ethnographer’s other theoretical commitments might be. Back to First Principles In much of this chapter I have emphasized embodiment and the physical aspects of linguistic practices. But these are only part of the more general problem of language’s participation in materiality. That problem can be addressed in many other ways, such as in regard to language’s role in a political economy, a topic I explored in an essay some years ago (Irvine 1989). In that essay I also drew an extended example from my Wolof fieldwork, illustrating the economic dimension of interaction between griots and higher-ranking persons. Griots were paid in cash for their words praising their patrons – praises whose value was shaped by the producer’s nature and skills in managing the flow of word-molded air – just as a smith might be paid for producing valuable jewelry, whose production required skillful handling of fire and molten metal. Perhaps it is not surprising that speaking and its associated communicative behavior should enter deeply into a local economy, given the ideas about language that I outline in this chapter as well. On the other hand, I thought then – and still do – that language and linguistic practices are profoundly engaged in economic life and (more generally) in materiality everywhere – not only in Senegalese villages. How, ultimately, should one conceive of “language” and “materiality” such that their relationship is not limited to a correspondence theory of meaning, with language merely a set of mental representations for a world of external things? That approach is inadequate for either language or materiality, but finding new construals is not a simple matter. (If it were, the present volume would be unnecessary.) A recent collection of essays exploring “materiality” (Miller 2005) makes it clear that the concept is multifaceted, even without incorporating a concept of language. In fact, scholarly discussion of materiality has delved into so many issues that it becomes difficult, as Krisztina Feherváry

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language?

289

(2015) has suggested, to teach courses on it; in teaching, rather than trying to discuss “materiality” in general, one must focus on its various spheres. So our question about language and, or in, materiality is difficult too. Now, it is obvious that there is a material substrate to everything in human life, because we are biological creatures, and because language itself, however you define it or delimit it, requires somatic equipment, including our brains for cognition. But we do not know enough about neurobiology to say very much about the more complex aspects of cognition involved in language, and even if we knew more it is not clear what such information about the biology of the individual brain would tell us. Limiting one’s focus to individual biology is too easily reductionist. It has difficulty explaining much about the public nature of language, the basis of its iterability. Language cannot be entirely private. Moreover, a focus on individual biology will also have difficulty accounting for much about humans’ complex social arrangements (enabled by language) or the role of language in them. One cannot grasp a complex system by looking only at its ingredients; the complexity resides at a different level – just as with the structure of a building, only some aspects of which are determined by its materials or are explainable by reference to them. To avoid such forms of determinism, Keane (in Chapter 2, this volume, and elsewhere) has proposed that we think of materiality in terms of affordance: as the conditions of possibility for sociality – for all the ways that people’s projects become available to others. And that availability depends on semiotic forms, including language, whose potential for social mediation requires that they be material. To conceive of materiality as affordance, he adds, means not only possibility but also constraint. Since we did not create the universe of which we are a part, even if we can only apprehend it through systems of signs, there are material conditions that limit and resist our actions – that are independent of our intentions and projects, preventing some from being realized.11 These ruminations about materiality are necessarily rather abstract, and they do not concern “language” as such. To do so it is useful to return to Peircean semiotics and recall that a Peircean approach embeds linguistic signs in a framework that does not segregate them from other kinds of signs, at the level of basic sign types and sign-relations. That is, Peirce offers a scheme of sign types – constructed from his three trichotomies – in which each type can accommodate either linguistic or nonlinguistic examples. “Language” is not an isolated realm of semiosis in this approach. Nor, if we look at linguistic practice, can we bound “language” off from the gestures, positionings, and even physical tools – from artificial limbs to writing instruments – that accompany language, contextualize it, inscribe it, and sometimes substitute for specific bits of discourse. Yet, I am not quite ready to entirely dissolve “language” into the semiotic soup. There are some aspects of language as such, as a particular kind of semiotic modality, that are distinctive. One of these distinctive aspects, at least,

290

Language and Materiality

is provided in the Peircean scheme: in addition to the basic sign types and signrelations, Peirce points out that a sign may be the object of another sign (Peirce 1955: 100).12 I call the second one a higher-level or meta-sign. At the metalevel, then, language has a special property of reflexivity, because it can refer to itself without simply reproducing the form it refers to. That is, language can refer to itself via a Peircean symbol, a convention of form; it does not have to rely on merely depicting its referent, as so many other kinds of semiosis must. (Consider, for example, the fact that I can refer to “the words in the ‘Marseillaise’” rather than by directly quoting them. In contrast, musical allusions to the “Marseillaise,” of which there are many, must reproduce some portion of the melody.) Notice, however, that in distinguishing language from other kinds of semiosis in this particular way, one does not divorce language from materiality, which is the condition of all semiotic practice. To draw on Peirce’s ideas, as I have done here, is not to argue that everything about language is conveniently (or even inconveniently) accounted for in his scheme. For example, one might wish to suggest that neither the complexities of syntax nor the relationality among signs of the same Peircean type (as seen in the Saussurean concept of “value” and Sapir’s concept of “pattern”), so crucial in the organization of linguistic form, are easily found in Peirce’s proposals. I remain agnostic, moreover, as to whether there are other properties of language that distinguish it from any other example of semiotic practice in addition to the reflexivity mentioned earlier. Pursuing those matters would lead too far afield. Instead, I conclude that the problem at hand – of the relationship between language and materiality – might better be reframed. Perhaps it is not so much a question of language and materiality as of semiosis and materiality – semiosis, of which language is a particularly important and in some ways distinctive, kind. In fact, there may be a danger in asking about “language and materiality,” if it results in comparing linguistic practice with semiotic practices having no overtly spoken component – with clothing, for example, if all the talk involved in shopping, and perhaps in dressing, is left out.13 That would mean comparing one set of semiotic practices with (part of) another, while already tending to equate the one with immaterial mind and the other with materiality. And where that happens, the gap between autonomous realms is back again. N OT E S 1 See Chomsky (1988), although Chomsky has written about the “mind/brain” in more than one work. 2 Although Hockett was a distinguished scholar, this particular paper has not found many friends among linguistic anthropologists. 3 Peirce (1955) is a convenient compilation of his writings on the logic of semiotics. 4 For exemplary ethnographic discussions of writing as bodily practice in other cultural contexts, see Becker (1984) and Messick (1993). See also Hall (2000) on the

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language?

5 6

7

8

9

10

11

12 13

291

materiality of letter writing in the nineteenth century, and other papers in the same volume. See Irvine (1978) on the preservation of genealogies, via special discursive practices, in this Senegalese context. For examples of such scholarship see Hull (2012a, 2012b) on the social life of bureaucratic documents, and various works on colonial archives and other forms of data collecting (e.g., Trouillot 1995 and Cooper and Stoler 1997). We may be reminded of Derrida’s (1976 [1967]) initially startling and provocative claim in Of Grammatology that writing is prior to spoken language. As was clarified later, he did not mean that writing came earlier chronologically, but that its detachment (différance) from its producer illustrated a crucial property of language in general: the iterability of the linguistic sign. Derrida’s argument in this and other works of the same period led him to oppose binarisms of many sorts, especially those in Saussurean structuralism. Derrida has been accused, however, of ignoring any linguistics after Saussure, as well as of obscurantism. Regardless of whether those accusations are apt, différance does apply equally to writing and speaking. Yet, it is probably fair to say that Derrida’s influence on American linguistics has been slight. Except, of course, for certain kinds of fiction writing. On scholarly writing, see also Smitherman’s works calling attention to the ideologies that exclude African American vernacular English from written scholarly texts (e.g., Smitherman 2000). The term “caste” derives from the emphasis, in Wolof as well as neighboring social traditions, on endogamy, rank, occupational specializations, and ideas of contamination. However, the term masks the presence of a crosscutting system of orders – relations between slave and free – that complicates the calculus of rank. See Irvine and Gunner (in press). Thanks are due to the African Studies Center, University of Michigan, and the National Research Foundation (Rated Researcher Grant), South Africa, for support of our South African fieldwork. I am indebted here to Keane’s posting and oral remarks contributed to a recent workshop on “Materiality,” held at the University of Michigan on September 27, 2015. See also Keane (2005). Actually, in some passages he proposes that the Interpretant is itself a sign, representing another sign; see Peirce (1955: 99). But see Keane (2005) for an excellent account of the semiotics of clothing, including a critique of approaches to material objects that dismiss language as residing on a quite separate plane of reality.

REFERENCES Agha, Asif, and Stton Wortham, eds. 2005. “Discourse across Speech Events: Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Social Life. Special issue.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1). Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59– 88. Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

292

Language and Materiality

Becker, Alton. 1984. “Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb.” In Text, Play, and Story, edited by Edward M. Bruner, 135–155. (1983 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society). Washington DC: American Ethnological Society. Boas, Franz. 1966 [1911]. Introduction to Handbook of American Indian Languages. Preston Holder, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Cooper, Frederick and Ann Laura Stoler. 1997. “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking Research Agenda.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. edited by F. Cooper and A. Stoler, 1–56. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976 [1967]. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feherváry, Krisztina (2015). Comments posted for a workshop on “Materiality” held at the University of Michigan, September 2015. Hall, Nigel. 2000. “The Materiality of Letter Writing: A Nineteenth-Century Perspective.” In Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Edited by David Barton and Nigel Hall. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hockett, Charles. 1985. Distinguished Lecture: F. “American Anthropologist.” 87:263– 281. Hull, Matthew. 2012a. “Documents and Bureaucracy.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41:251–267. 2012b. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Irvine, Judith T.. 1978. “When Is Genealogy History? Wolof Genealogies in Comparative Perspective.” American Ethnologist 5:651–674. 1989. “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy.” American Ethnologist 16:248–267. 1990. “Registering Affect: Heteroglossia in the Linguistic Expression of Emotion.” In Language and the Politics of Emotion, edited by C. Lutz and L. Abu-Lughod, 126–161. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. “Société et communication chez les Wolof à travers le temps et l’espace.” In Société et communication Wolof: Héritage et creation, edited by Anna Diagne, Sascha Kesseler, and Christian Meyer, 37–70. Paris: L’Harmattan. Irvine, Judith T., and Liz Gunner. In press. “With Respect to Zulu: Revisiting ukuHlonipha.” Anthropological Quarterly. Keane, Webb. 2005. “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things.” In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 182–205. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lepsius, Karl Richard. 1880. Nubische Grammatik mit einer Enleitung über die Völker und Sprachen Afrika’s. Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1961 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Afterword: Materiality and Language, or Material Language?

293

1935. “Coral Gardens and Their Magic.” In Vol. 2: The Language of Magic and Gardening. New York: Dover. Messick, Brinkley. 1993. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Müller, Friedrich. 1877–1888. Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft. (4 vols.) Vienna: Alfred Hölder. Nakassis, Constantine. 2013. Materiality, Materialization, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3):399–406. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs.” In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler, 98–119. New York: Dover. Sapir, Edward. 1949 [1925]. “Sound Patterns in Language.” In Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Edited by David Mandelbaum, 33–45. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1949 [1933]. “The Psychological Reality Of Phonemes.” In Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, edited by David Mandelbaum, 46–60. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban, eds. 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smitherman, Geneva. 2000. Talkin That Talk: Language, Culture, and Education in African America. London: Routledge. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon. Ware, Rudolph. 2014. The Walking Qur’an. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Index

advertising. See markets and marketing, brands and branding aesthetics, 14, 54, 57, 58, 69, 75, 76, 79, 148, 151, 157, 177, 178, 195, 197, 199, 270 affect, 76, 81 affordances, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 80, 153, 155, 180, 187, 188, 197, 200, 226, 228, 233, 236, 237, 239, 240, 258, 271, 289 agency, 33, 34, 155, 157, 173 Agha, Asif, 12, 13, 192, 200, 204, 206, 220, 222 Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jama‘at tradition, 148 Ahmed, Sara, 76 ˚ Akeberg, Mattias, 74 Akwesasne, 205 ancestral cultures, 147, 148 anchoring, 179, 180 Andersen, Hans Christian, 256 Anderson, Benedict, 67 Anishinaabe, 205 Appadurai, Arjun, 200 Aqua World Ibaraki Prefectural Oarai Aquarium, 55 Aristotle, 144 Asahara Sh¯ok¯o, 46 ASL (Azienda Sanitaria Locale), 108, 123 assemblages, 21, 51, 88, 192, 226, 228, 229, 271, 272, 274 Aum Shinriky¯o, 46 Austin, John L., 15, 106, 230 Australian Vogue, 177 authenticity, 4, 11, 147, 148, 150, 154, 156, 167, 172, 174, 177, 179, 180, 252, 253, 279, 287 autocorrect, 5 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13, 125, 133 Barelwi, Ahmad Riza Khan, 156 Barelwi tradition, 148, 156 Barthes, Roland, 9, 32 Baskerville (font), 70 Basso, Keith, 12

Baudrillard, Jean, 32 Bauman, Richard, 179, 278, 279 Berkeley Japanese Kite Festival, 56 Berlin, Irving, 128 bilingualism, 165, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 178, 253 biopolitics, 2, 29 Birth of African American Culture (Mintz and Price), 272 Black, Shirley Temple, 140 blackboxing, 37, 226, 227, 278 Bloomfield, Roy, 38 Boas, Franz, 11, 21, 34, 211, 280 bodies, 6. See also embodiment, gender, race Bodies That Matter (Butler), 261 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 13, 20, 110, 185, 189, 251, 252 Brandom, Robert, 38 brands and branding, 16, 21, 58, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 81, 87, 88, 90, 97, 100, 101, 165, 166, 167, 168, 174, 180, 198, 200, 206, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221 Briggs, Charles, 179, 278, 279 British Airways, 193, 194 Bühler, Karl, 149 Burma Camp Barracks, 129 Bush, George W., 137 Butler, Judith, 15, 107, 261 calligraphy, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58 Calvinism, 279, 280, 281 Carnap, Rudolf, 21 Cavanaugh, Jillian, 34, 227, 230 CCP (Critical Control Points), 111, 121 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), 63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 72, 74, 82 Ch’ach’a, 244 Chardin, Jean, 239 Chavez, Everett, 213, 214 Chilcotin, 209, 210 Chomsky, Noam, 8, 9, 279, 283 Christian Moderns (Keane), 278

295

296

Index

Chrysler Corporation, 222 circulation, 3, 4, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 44, 45, 48, 58, 66, 67, 71, 81, 82, 87, 88, 89, 93, 100, 101, 107, 120, 122, 126, 127, 136, 144, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 171, 172, 179, 186, 193, 199, 204, 205, 207, 219, 253, 257, 258, 266, 280, 283. See also globalilzation, materiality citation, 129, 207, 220 citizenship, 4, 148 class, 1, 3, 10, 19, 32, 38, 50, 71, 88, 109, 185, 186, 187, 189, 191, 193, 194, 199, 200, 236, 244, 256, 257, 260, 262, 263, 272, 273, 280 Clinton, Bill, 137 CM Entertainment Magazine, 45 CM Now, 45 cognitivism, 8, 9, 17, 31, 35, 36, 289 Colleran, Jonathon, 39 colonialism, 14, 21, 127, 128, 129, 148, 239, 240, 271, 272, 273, 274, 279, 291 colonoware, 272, 273 Comic Sans, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82 commodification, 10, 11, 16, 18, 19, 20, 34, 44, 45, 50, 54, 57, 58, 60, 87, 88, 89, 90, 100, 133, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 177, 179, 180, 181, 192, 197, 198, 200, 227, 251, 252, 253, 258. See also brands and branding Connare, Vincent, 63, 64, 70, 71 conspicuous consumption, 10, 11 constructionism, 39 Consumer Mind Index, 45 consumerism, 11 contextualization, 3, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 38, 50, 72, 93, 113, 118, 126, 128, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 167, 169, 170, 173, 179, 186, 189, 192, 213, 221, 230, 231, 239, 266, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 280, 284, 291 Count Basie, 128, 135 Cox, Brian, 63 creolization, 21, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274 Critical Discourse Analysis, 187, 188 culturedness, 241 Cyrillic script, 68 Dasein, 39 Dawdy, Shannon, 271 Dawkins, Richard, 36 death. See funerals decoding, 31, 152, 265, 266, 267 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 291. See also citation Descartes, René, 6, 11, 20, 255, 256, 258, 277

diacritic marks, 207, 220 dialectics, 2, 30, 36, 38, 208 diasporas, 4, 128, 147, 148, 156, 157, 270, 271 diné, 212, 213, 217, 222 Dinwoodie, David, 209, 210 discourse, 3, 4, 19, 20, 31, 38, 50, 55, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 113, 136, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 166, 171, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 185, 187, 188, 192, 193, 199, 200, 205, 206, 207, 208, 213, 216, 220, 222, 239, 251, 260, 261, 262, 263, 279, 280, 282, 283, 289, 291 documentation, 7, 11, 18, 52, 67, 87, 88, 91, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 126, 128, 129, 258, 273, 291 Douglas, Mary, 198 drinking, 21, 136, 137, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 242, 243, 244, 245 dualisms, 2, 8, 11, 21, 30, 125, 144, 166, 204, 255, 258, 277, 281, 287, 288 Duchêne, Alexandre, 208 Durkheim, Émile, 34, 35 dwelling, 7 Ebisu Yoshikazu, 57 ecology, 21, 226, 228, 229, 230 Economy and Society (Weber), 35 Education Alliance Japan Communications Company, 45 elite travelers, 19, 185, 189, 192, 200 Elizabeth II (Queen), 138 embodiment, 3, 6, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 56, 89, 103, 110, 111, 116, 121, 123, 126, 135, 151, 154, 157, 187, 192, 200, 207, 227, 231, 233, 234, 239, 240, 251, 252, 255, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 268, 273, 277, 279, 280, 281, 282, 285, 286, 287, 288, 290 emoticons, 17, 53 Empire of Things, The (Myers), 127 encoding, 31, 57, 152 Engels, Friedrich, 3, 9 entailment, 2, 13, 14, 19, 50, 52, 108, 113, 118, 177, 191, 192, 200, 256 entextualization, 44, 146, 149, 150, 151, 156, 180, 188, 192, 283 ESPN, 87, 89, 90, 93, 96, 97 ethnography, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 14, 17, 19, 30, 89, 105, 109, 111, 122, 125, 126, 193, 198, 227, 233, 253, 256, 258, 277, 278, 284, 286, 287, 290

Index etymology, 91, 92, 94 Eucharist, the, 31, 199, 255 Euskara, 205 Fair Trade, 105 Favorite CM Characters, 45 Feherváry, Krisztina, 277 Feld, Steve, 282 feminism, 21, 47, 261, 263 Ferguson, Leland, 273 First Nations, 205, 207, 210, 211 firstness, 3, 15, 89, 146, 159, 231 fontroversies, 72, 73, 79, 80, 81, 82 fonts, 5, 18, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 171, 221, 266, 267, 268 food safety, 18, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121 Franken, R. B., 71 Frege, Gottlob, 216 Fukushima Daiichi power plant, 43 Fundamental Knowledge of Contemporary Words, 45, 46 funerals, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135, 136, 141 Futura (font), 68, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80 Garamond (font), 70 Garcia, Joe, 213 gardens, 238, 239, 240, 241, 287 Geertz, Clifford, 8, 9 gender, 3, 15, 21, 47, 48, 69, 231, 234, 236, 237, 240, 257, 261, 262, 263, 272, 280 Georgia, 21, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245 gerira g¯ou, 50 Gianotti, Fabiola Gianotti, 63 Gilbert, Dan, 71 Gill, Eric, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 Gill Sans (font), 77, 78, 79, 81 Gillespie, Dizzy, 128, 129 globalization, 4, 5, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 56, 57, 58, 74, 90, 105, 108, 112, 122, 128, 166, 167, 168, 175, 177, 178, 180, 186, 193, 205, 211, 219, 221, 261 Goffman, Erving, 12, 150, 190 “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” (Mingus), 135 Goodwin, Marjorie and Charles, 12 graveyards, 237, 238 Griffiths, Eifion, 165 griots, 286, 288 Guggisberg, Frederick Gordon, 129 Gumperz, John J., 40 Gunner, Liz, 286

297 habitus, 110, 126, 187 HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), 117, 122 Harré, Rom, 200 Harris, Marvin, 30 Harris, Sam, 36 Hegel, G. W. F., 33 hegemony, 38, 239 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 37, 39, 79, 111 Heller, Monica, 180, 208 Helvetica (font), 68, 70 Herzfeld, Michael, 76 Higgs, Peter, 63, 64, 69, 70 Hill, Jane, 50 Hitchens, Christopher, 36 Hockett, Charles, 279 hospitality, 237 Hrdlickova, Ivana, 73, 74 Hugo, Victor, 256 hybridity, 50, 136, 239, 279 hylomorphism, 144, 145, 146 I Died a Thousand Times (film), 137 iconicity, 10, 12, 18, 21, 53, 65, 72, 74, 76, 80, 92, 117, 120, 125, 134, 146, 150, 155, 156, 172, 186, 190, 195, 200, 207, 226, 227, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 245 ideology language ideology and, 10, 14, 15, 65, 70, 72, 117, 170, 199, 251, 252, 267 media ideology and, 146, 153, 154 political ideology and, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 36, 38, 45, 46, 48, 53, 58, 65, 66, 68, 81, 82, 88, 165, 167, 168, 169, 172, 181, 185, 186, 187, 188, 199, 205, 208, 210, 219, 237, 239, 240, 256, 257, 263, 265, 274, 280, 288 semiotic ideology and, 154, 280 Ikea, 73 immateriality, 2, 8, 20, 38, 177, 258, 272, 278, 279, 290 Incandela, Joseph, 63 indexicality, 2, 10, 15, 21, 31, 32, 36, 38, 50, 65, 72, 78, 79, 88, 113, 114, 116, 118, 120, 121, 146, 150, 151, 155, 156, 186, 188, 191, 195, 198, 199, 200, 206, 207, 216, 219, 226, 227, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 245. See also semiotics Indian Country Today, 212 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, 222 Instant Messaging, 17 instrumentality, 33 International Organization for Standardization, 108, 116, 119 interpretability, 267 Inuit, 68, 207

298

Index

Ireland, 19, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181 Irish Times, 178 Isla Verde, 21, 260, 263 Islam, 19, 132, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 286 Jaffe, Alexandra, 165 Jakobson, Roman, 14, 17, 31, 33, 34, 38, 39, 94, 125, 142, 189 James, LeBron, 71 Jameson, Frederic, 39 Japan Society of Northern California, 56 Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society, 51, 52 Jiyu Kokuminsha, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 Joanna (font), 77 Jones, Graham, 16 Kahnawake, 205 Kamei Hajime, 49 Kang Sang-jung, 46 kanji, 18, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 252 Kanji of the Year, 18, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59 Kanken. See kanji Kant, Immanuel, 8, 34 Karp, Ivan, 233 Keane, Webb, 7, 15, 17, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 117, 151, 271, 278, 279, 280, 281, 291 Kennedy, John F., 137, 139 Kewa Pueblo, 212, 213, 214, 215, 222 Kile, Robert Lee, 141 kinship, 3, 238 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 127 kizuna, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59 Kodomo-tench¯o, 49 Kokka no hinkaku, 49 Korean Air, 191, 201 kotodama, 50 Kress, Gunther, 188 Kripke, Saul, 206 Kuipers, Aert, 211, 212 Kwak’wala, 205, 211 Kwakiutl, 205, 210, 211 Kwakwaka’wakw, 205, 210, 211 La, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 136, 137, 138, 139 labor modalities, 18, 107, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 120, 121, 122 language. See also brands and branding

as practice, 2, 4, 13, 106, 121 cognitivism and, 8, 17 commodification of, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 36, 44, 46, 47, 48, 58, 98, 105, 110, 127, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172, 174, 178, 180, 181, 185, 186, 187, 193, 199, 201, 206, 216, 226, 251, 252, 253, 256 dualisms and, 3, 7, 8, 11, 21, 30, 125, 145, 146, 147, 158, 166, 204, 255, 258, 277, 278, 281, 287, 288 embodiment and, 15 ideology and, 10, 14, 15, 65, 70, 72, 87, 117, 146, 153, 170, 171, 251, 254, 265, 267, 280, 281 materiality and, 1, 2 meaning-making and, 9 mentalist approaches to, 3, 11, 30, 39, 278, 283, 289 music and, 256 naming and, 20 objectification of, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 32, 43, 44, 50, 55, 75, 76, 87, 88, 90, 106, 111, 117, 121, 126, 127, 142, 144, 145, 153, 154, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 187, 188, 190, 193, 199, 200, 204, 206, 227, 229, 233, 236, 241, 251, 258, 261, 265, 268, 271, 272, 273, 274, 279, 282, 283, 291 political economy and, 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 20, 66, 88, 167, 168, 181, 187, 195, 199, 205, 222, 253, 256, 257, 280, 288 revitalization and, 16, 19, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 180, 181, 207 semiotics and, 38 socialization and, 12 toasting and, 21, 226, 229, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 242, 243, 244 Language Log, 56 language materiality, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 16, 17, 19, 21, 43, 44, 48, 53, 87, 88, 92, 94, 97, 100, 106, 107, 121, 122, 154, 159, 166, 220, 227, 253 langue, 204, 277, 281, 283, 284. See also dualisms Lanham Act, 217 Lapland, 205 Lapps, 205 Lash, Scott, 186, 195 Latour, Bruno, 5, 32, 39, 226, 227 legibility, 21, 207, 267 legisigns, 146, 159 Leonard, Wesley, 220

Index Lepsius, K. R., 279 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 9, 17, 33, 226, 228, 229 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 138 linguistic anthropology, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15, 17, 21, 205, 260, 261, 278, 280, 283 linguistic marketplaces, 10, 13, 14, 16, 217, 218, 251 linguistic turn, 37 Listeria, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120 localism, 19, 105, 122, 173 Locke, John, 8, 277, 278, 279, 280, 284 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 256 Louis Mulcahy, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181 “love injection”, 47 Lufthansa, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201 Lury, Celia, 186, 195 MacCarthy, Fiona, 77, 78, 79 Madarame Haruki, 43 magic, 11, 199, 287 Mahankali, Arvind, 95 Malinowski, B., 11, 284, 287 marketing branding and, 19 markets and marketing. See brands and branding branding and, 16, 21, 65, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81 commodification of langauge and, 11 “Marseillaise, the” (song), 290 Marvin, Lee, 138 Marx, Karl, 2, 3, 9 Marxism, 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 13, 32, 38, 44 Mashantucket Pequot, 218 Mass Observation, 236 material culture, 10, 11, 88, 98, 101, 145, 237, 258, 265, 266, 270, 272, 273 materiality. See also brands and branding, circulation, commodification, language materiality, sound studies conceptualizations of, 1, 5, 6, 35, 43, 261 contexts of speech and, 11 creolization and, 5, 10, 21, 271, 274, 279 cultural materialism and, 9 definitions of, 228 dualisms and, 1, 2, 8, 11, 16, 18, 21, 30, 33, 125, 126, 144, 145, 146, 151, 154, 158, 166, 168, 186, 204, 227, 255, 258, 261, 273, 277, 281 fonts and typefaces and, 18, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82

299 immateriality and, 8, 20 linguistic anthropology practices and, 5 marketing and, 19 mediality and, 17, 116, 126, 158 objectification and, 5, 21, 43, 44, 48, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 87, 88, 91, 93, 100, 167, 171 practices and, 1, 2 psychologies of, 36 semiotics and, 13, 31, 34, 37, 38, 71, 146, 147, 228 of sound, 19, 21 of spelling, 91 textuality and, 67, 82 writing as, 91 Materiality (Pinney), 274 materialization, 18, 38, 43, 97, 146, 156, 166, 167, 170, 172, 180, 187, 200 Mauritius, 19, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158 Mazda Corporation, 222 McIlwraith, T. F., 211 McLuhan, Marshall, 32 Mead, Margaret, 30 media studies, 4, 151 mediality, 3, 4, 16, 18, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 122 aesthetics and, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 33, 34, 43, 44, 45, 48, 51, 54, 57, 58, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 81, 82, 87, 91, 92, 106, 115, 116, 117, 118, 126, 145, 147, 149, 152, 154, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 178, 179, 180, 186, 187, 188, 192, 199, 200, 206, 208, 219, 221, 227, 230, 236, 237, 240, 242, 243, 245, 251, 252, 253, 256, 258, 271, 279, 280, 283, 285, 286, 288, 289, 291 definition of, 3 fonts and typefaces and, 18, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 ideologies and, 154 McLuhan on, 32, 33 transduction and, 144, 146, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158 writing and, 5, 66, 75, 88, 93, 97, 173, 265, 281, 282, 285 Meintjies, Louise, 258 Melin Tregwynt, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181 memory, 7, 75, 125, 126, 127, 129, 139, 141, 142, 282 mentalism, 11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 6, 7 Merman, Ethel, 128

300

Index

Merriam-Webster dictionaries, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 metabo, 50 metacultural phenomena, 166, 167, 168, 175, 179, 180 metapragmatics, 3, 116, 206 Miami. See myaamia Miller, Daniel, 11 mind/brain, 279, 290 Mingus, Charles, 135 Mink, Amanda, 257 Mintz, Sidney, 272 Miskitu, 257 Mitchell, Joni, 135 Mitsuru Yaku, 46 modernity, 128, 177, 178, 236, 243, 244, 278, 279 Mohawk, 205 monism, 280 Moral Sense, The (Wilson), 36 Mori Seihan, 53, 54, 55, 56 Müller, Friedrich, 279 Munn, Nancy, 11 Muroi Shigeru, 46 music, 20, 95, 97, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 142, 157, 158, 159, 239, 241, 255, 256, 257, 258, 290 myaamia, 209, 210, 215, 216 Myers, Fred, 11, 125, 127 na‘t, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158 Nambé Pueblo, 218, 219 naming, 20, 205, 207, 208, 214, 216, 218, 220, 221, 274 Nater, Henk, 211 nation states, 4, 14, 16, 44, 53, 57, 65, 67, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 87, 88, 89, 90, 97, 139, 147, 156, 157, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 172, 174, 180, 181, 201, 210, 211, 217, 233, 253, 254, 262, 279 Native Americans, 19, 20, 204, 205, 210, 214, 218, 220, 221, 222, 272 nativization, 208, 209, 210, 214 Navajo, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217, 222, 223 NBC, 89 Nemiah Aboriginal Wilderness Preserve, 209 neoliberalism, 251 neo-traditionalist names and naming, 207, 208, 210, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221 New Mexican, 214, 218, 219 New Words and Trendy Words Card Game, 45 New York Times, 36, 73 “A Night in Tunisia” (Gillespie), 128, 129

nikushoku-kei joshi, 49 Nootka, 205, 211 “Novi Deke” (song), 136 Nunu, Nii Yemo, 128, 130, 131, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141 Nuu-chah-nulth, 205, 211 Nuxalk, 211, 212 O’Connor, Flannery, 255 objectification, 5, 11, 18, 38, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 54, 57, 58, 89, 93, 95, 97, 100, 168, 172, 173, 180, 198, 206 Obon festivals, 55 Ohkay Owingeh, 212, 213, 214 oinoglossia, 199, 200 Ojibwa, 205 Ollennu, Nii Ashai, 128 ontogenesis, 145 ontology, 1, 2, 3, 155, 156, 157 Orientalism, 239, 240, 241 Ortachala gardens, 239, 240 orthography, 2, 21, 66, 67, 68, 69, 87, 88, 94, 175, 208, 210, 212, 218, 221, 258, 267. See also spelling Palahniuk, Volodymyr, 137 Palance, Jack, 137 Palmie’, Stephan, 274 Papago, 205 Papua New Guinea, 126, 129, 141, 142 parole, 204, 205, 231, 277 See also dualisms Peirce, Charles Saunders, 3, 15, 31, 32, 39, 146, 150, 159, 228, 231, 278, 281, 289, 290, 291 perception, 2, 6, 7, 11, 37, 38, 152, 154, 159, 187, 256 performativity, 15, 16, 18, 20, 44, 48, 50, 75, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126, 128, 135, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 188, 189, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200, 205, 207, 220, 230, 231, 252, 253, 255, 257, 258, 261, 272, 285 Perpetua (font), 77 Perry, John, 245 phenomenology, 2, 6, 7, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 199 Pietikäinen, Sari, 165 Pinker, Steven, 30, 36, 256 Pinney, Chris, 274 pitch (vocal), 13, 106, 114, 266, 285 poa, 46 poetics, 3, 14, 33, 34, 38, 39, 94, 125, 134, 142, 146, 155, 189, 234, 283, 287 Poffenberger, A. T., 71

Index political economy, 1, 2, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 21, 44, 51, 97, 100, 107, 122, 189, 199, 251, 252, 262 Por Por, 19, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 139, 142, 282 Honk Horn Music of Ghana (La Drivers Union), 128, 130, 131, 132, 142 positivism, 38 power relations, 1, 15, 29, 31 practices food practices and, 110, 111 language as, 1, 2, 5, 13, 14, 18, 19, 39, 43, 82, 88, 91, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 144, 147, 148, 151, 153, 154, 156, 158, 168, 169, 178, 181, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 198, 199, 200, 205, 208, 215, 216, 220, 221, 227, 240, 243, 252, 253, 255, 257, 262, 266, 270, 274, 279, 281, 283, 284, 288, 290, 291 of linguistic anthropology, 5 religious, 19, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158 presence, 1, 2, 18, 68, 79, 81, 97, 115, 119, 120, 126, 128, 134, 136, 144, 146, 147, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 221, 227, 236, 241, 255, 273, 285, 291 presupposition, 14, 115, 191 Price, Richard, 272 print capitalism, 67, 87, 90 privilege, 4, 19, 185, 189, 195, 199, 200 pronunciation. See speech Pub and the People, The (Mass Observation), 236 puns, 97, 98 purification, 278, 279, 280, 283 Putnam, Hilary, 38, 206 qualia, 3, 15, 37, 66, 68, 71, 72, 195, 228, 231, 236, 256 qualisign, 11, 15, 146, 150, 159, 195, 197, 228, 281 quiddity, 32, 33, 34, 39 Quine, W. V. O., 33 Qur’anic recitations, 148, 285 race, 3, 11, 257, 262, 263, 279, 280 Rancierre, Jacques, 38 Rappaport, Ian, 35 Rawlings, J. J., 138, 141 Reagan, Ronald, 141 realism, 30 recontextualization, 44, 45, 134, 149, 150, 173, 179, 180, 188

301 reductionism, 30, 35, 289 reki-jo, 49 relativism, 255 religion, 19, 46, 126, 129, 132, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 256, 279, 288 renomination, 20, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 212, 214, 219, 221 reputation, 18, 75, 78, 108, 125, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135, 136, 141 revitalization (of languages), 4, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177, 180, 207, 215, 221, 257 rivalry, 226, 229, 241, 242, 243, 245 Rodger, Elliot, 260, 261, 262, 263 Salaryman Poem contest, 59 Sámi, 205 Sapir, Edward, 3, 11, 21, 280 Sápmi, 205 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 9, 21, 31, 32, 145, 146, 147, 204, 229, 255, 277, 290, 291 Savage Mind, The (Barthes), 32 Savile, Jimmy, 82 Schieffelin, Bambi B., 16 Schutz, Alfred, 38 Scollon, R., 67, 190, 192, 266 Scranage, Sharon, 141, 142 Scripps’ National Spelling Bee, 21, 58, 87, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 101 script choices, 21, 53, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, 125, 198, 265, 266, 267, 268, 285, 286. See also typefaces secondness, 146, 228 semiotic tolerance, 72 semiotics definitions of, 66, 146 ecology and, 21, 226, 227, 228, 234, 245 iconicity and, 146, 156, 172, 186, 207, 227 ideologies and, 154 ideologies of, 15, 117, 192, 280, 281 indexicality and, 10, 15, 21, 31, 36, 50, 72, 78, 79, 88, 113, 118, 146, 151, 155, 156, 186, 187, 188, 191, 198, 200, 206, 207, 219, 226, 227, 230, 231, 234, 236 materiality and, 34, 71, 146, 147 Peirce and, 289 performativity and, 107 presupposition and entailment and, 192, 287 social sciences and, 30, 31 socialization and, 12, 19, 187, 188, 189, 205 sexuality, 15, 257, 262, 263 Shane (film), 137

302

Index

Shankar, Shalini, 34, 227, 230 shifters, 15, 192 Shimizu Hitoshi, 46 Shimotani Nisuke, 45 shod¯o, 54 Sierra Mazateca, 255, 257, 258 Silverstein, Michael, 7, 15, 17, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 69, 151, 198, 199 Simondon, Gilbert, 145, 153 sinsigns, 204 Six Leçons sur le Son et le Sens (Jakobson), 33 Slater, Don, 173 slavery, 21, 270, 271, 272, 273, 291 social media, 5, 21, 43, 44, 48, 63, 64, 69, 70, 80, 82, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 98, 174, 222, 260, 262, 263 Social Semiotics, 188, 189 socialization, 12 sound studies, 1, 2, 14, 18, 19, 21, 87, 89, 94, 96, 114, 125, 126, 127, 134, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 205, 220, 221, 256, 257, 285 Soussoudis, Michael, 141 Soviet Union, 237, 241 spatiality, 6, 7, 12, 38, 53, 58, 67, 69, 73, 82, 126, 146, 149, 154, 157, 170, 171, 173, 179, 188, 189, 192, 199, 200, 219, 230, 236, 237, 239, 252, 258, 263, 265, 266, 271, 273, 274 speech, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 37, 47, 48, 58, 66, 91, 95, 97, 125, 127, 136, 141, 147, 152, 169, 170, 171, 172, 188, 189, 193, 198, 199, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 215, 220, 230, 231, 233, 244, 251, 255, 257, 258, 265, 266, 277, 278, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 291 spelling, 21, 51, 58, 68, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 140, 208, 209, 210, 215, 221 sponsorship, 44, 59, 67, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 283 Stalin, Joseph, 243 standardization, 21, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 101, 171, 279, 284 Stasch, Rupert, 227 structuralism, 8, 9, 12, 29, 30, 32, 35, 66, 228, 229, 289, 291 Structuralism and Ecology (Levi-Strauss), 226, 228 style, 47, 67, 68, 69, 72, 74, 96, 128, 148, 151, 157, 244, 245, 268 subject, the, 7, 8, 9, 15, 35, 37, 39, 107, 257

Sufism, 148, 149 Sugi-chan, 50 suppletion, 208, 210, 211, 212, 214 supra (ritual), 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245 swag, 87, 98 swiggling, 233 symbolic anthropology, 8, 9, 11 talk, 12, 16, 17, 18, 21, 66, 105, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 131, 226, 227, 230, 231, 233, 234, 290 Talmor, Ruti, 125, 134, 135 tattoos, 56 Tawara Machi, 46 technologies, 4, 5, 16, 17, 19, 21, 70, 80, 142, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 188, 257, 261, 262, 266, 268. See also mediality temporality, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 19, 20, 31, 33, 37, 38, 39, 48, 50, 64, 68, 89, 100, 108, 111, 116, 119, 126, 127, 130, 135, 136, 146, 173, 174, 177, 188, 194, 198, 199, 207, 208, 213, 215, 220, 221, 233, 234, 243, 258, 263, 267, 271, 273 tenses (verbal), 39 texting, 17 textuality, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 13, 17, 19, 21, 43, 51, 52, 54, 56, 60, 66, 67, 68, 82, 116, 120, 146, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 158, 170, 185, 188, 197, 221, 257, 260, 265, 266, 267, 268, 278, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289, 290, 291 thetics and, 79 thetics of, 76 things, 48 thing-words, 193, 200 thirdness, 146 Time Magazine, 73 Times (font), 68, 70 toasting, 226, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 237, 243, 244, 245 Tohono O’odham, 205 tokens, 68, 146, 149, 150, 151, 152, 158, 175, 195, 204, 215, 216, 220, 228, 229, 231 Torigoe Shuntar¯o, 46 tourism, 16, 19, 57, 90, 95, 96, 166, 170, 175, 177, 178, 181, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195, 200, 201, 253 Tracy, Megan, 108 transculturation, 271 transducers, 144, 151, 152 transduction, 19, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 189, 221 transformation, 5, 13, 17, 20, 21, 30, 81, 88, 93, 111, 113, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151,

Index 152, 153, 166, 167, 168, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 188, 195, 205 translation, 188, 221, 253, 288 transmodalization, 189, 198 transmutation, 189 transparency, 72, 112, 119, 120, 122, 266 tro tro, 131, 132, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142 Ts’il?os, 209 Tsilhq’utin, 209 Turner, Victor, 8 typification, 38 Typophile forums, 73, 74, 77 U-Can New and Trendy Word Grand Prix, 18, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 58, 59 UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara), 260, 263 Up to Creation Brain, 45 Urciuoli, B, 192 Urla, Jacqueline, 205 value elite travelers and, 19 facts and, 35 langauge’s creation of, 173, 208, 253 language’s creation of, 166, 177, 197, 252, 253 meaning and, 16 van Eijk, Jan, 211, 212 van Leeuwen, Theo, 68, 69, 187, 188 Vancouver Sun, 209, 210 Velleman, David, 38 Venketachalam, Gokul, 95 Verdana (typeface), 65, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80 Verdanagate, 73, 76, 80 violence, 21, 81, 256, 260, 262, 263 virtual, the, 30, 33, 176 Voegelin, C. F., 142 voice, 4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 44, 54, 63, 66, 71, 72, 97, 106, 114, 115, 125,

303 126, 127, 128, 134, 136, 139, 142, 144, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 170, 179, 180, 186, 187, 204, 205, 207, 216, 220, 221, 245, 255, 257, 258, 265, 266, 267, 268, 272, 279, 281, 282, 283, 284, 287, 290, 291 Voloshinov, V. N., 13 Wade, Nicholas, 36 wairudo dar¯o?, 50 Wales, 19, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 180, 181 Ware, Rudolph, 285 Wari, 272 Wasq’u, 208 Wayo, Nicholas, 131, 132 Weber, Max, 34, 35 Webster, Noah, 90 Weidman, Amanda, 258 Weiner, Annette, 11, 125, 126, 127, 139, 141, 142 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 3, 8, 11, 38, 39 Wilkie, Laurie, 270 Williams, Raymond, 1, 2, 10 Wilson, James Q., 36 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 66 Wolof, 284, 285, 286, 288, 291 word lists, 87, 91, 93 word-things, 43, 193, 200 writing. See orthography, script choices Xeni Gwet’in, 209 Yakama, 209, 210 yama-g¯aru, 49 Yanagisawa Hakuo, 46 Yanai Michihiko, 46 Young, Lester, 135 Zulu, 258, 284, 286